Restless: A Novel Book

William Boyd goes all John John le Carré and has written a pretty good spy thriller that felt like reading a movie, with it's fast-paced tense narrative, and moments that were utterly gripping.
Central to the story is Eva Delectorskaya, the daughter of a Russian family in 1930s Paris. After mourning her brother's death she is approached, wooed to attraction, by the dapper Lucas Romer, who wants her to leave her shipping company to work for his mysterious British organisation against the Nazi threat. He convinces her with the revelation that her brother worked for him, and died in the line of duty.Trained in espionage techniques to become a top spy, in one of the most successful sections she is put work in Romer's London agency, using a sophisticated network to feed false stories into the news networks in the hope of damaging enemy confidence. she no doubt is playing a dangerous game, risking her life for Queen and country. Eventually Eva is moved to New York, where Romer's team uses similar propagandist means to convince America to join Britain in the war, and it's here where things turn sour when sent to New Mexico.

Cleverly done, Boyd is telling this story through the daughter of Eva, Ruth, who has her own story also, in 1970's Oxfordshire involving student politics and the Baader-Meinhof gang. When her indomitable widowed mother starts worrying her life is in danger she enlists the radical single mum Ruth to help in a potentially dangerous mission, but digging around in the past is never a good idea. Although a solid enough read, Boyd seems a decent storyteller, but it's certainly nothing new, and this territory has been covered to far greater effect by other writers. The easy to read page-turning nature may have been welcoming to some, but I was hoping for something deeper and darker, which it didn't really deliver on, a good satisfying ending was my high point. And the fact it won a Costa novel award shows it's limitations.