Restless

A Novel

By: William Boyd

Narrated by: Rosamund Pike

William Boyd's Restless is a brilliant espionage audiobook and a vivid portrait of the life of a female spy. Full of tension and drama, and based on a remarkable chapter of Anglo-American history, this is listening at its finest.

"I am Eva Delectorskaya," Sally Gilmartin announces, and so on a warm summer afternoon in 1976 her daughter, Ruth, learns that everything she ever knew about her mother was a carefully constructed lie. Sally Gilmartin is a respectable English widow living in picturesque Cotswold village; Eva Delectorskaya was a rigorously trained World War II spy, a woman who carried fake passports and retreated to secret safe houses, a woman taught to lie and deceive, and above all, to never trust anyone.

Three decades later the secrets of Sally's past still haunt her. Someone is trying to kill her and at last she has decided to trust Ruth with her story. Ruth, meanwhile, is struggling to make sense of her own life as a young single mother with an unfinished graduate degree and escalating dependence on alcohol. She is drawn deeper and deeper into the astonishing events of her mother's past—the mysterious death of Eva's beloved brother, her work in New York City manipulating the press in order to shift public sentiment toward American involvement in the war, her dangerous romantic entanglement. Now Sally wants to find the man who recruited her for the secret service, and she needs Ruth's help.

©2006 William Boyd; (P)2006 Audio Renaissance, a divison of Holtzbrinck Publishers, LLC

Shadow and Light

This could have been a really great book, I think. If only the author wouldn´t have left so many interwoven story lines unsolved. During the course of the narration (which needs a bit of concentration, as the chapters constantly switch between the 1940´s and 1976) you get to meet quite a lot of fellows with a history of their own (potential left-wing and Arab terrorists, for example) that just happen to fade out completety, forgotten threats that are annoying in the end when you come to realize how much more could have been spent on the fascinating story central to this novel.

Thumbs up for Rosamund Pike who delivers a marvelous performance, including an autehntic variety of accents and languages!

elegant and beautifully written

An enthralling and original story. Beatifully written and narrated. Wish more of Boyd were available on Audible.

Fun Listen

This title was more fun than deep. Relatively well-written and interesting plot for mystery lovers. Entertaining but I forgot it pretty quickly. Good car listening. Ocassionally hard to follow. Good narration.

A Beautiful Tale, Read Brilliantly

Beyond the adornments of spycraft and history, this is a story of family, and the deeper revelations of human empathy which all too often we leave until quite late in the game.

Pike, while also a talent onscreen, has a true gift for this, and we should be deeply grateful for further stories told with her expansive collection of voices.

Love the story but the narration not good.

The story is great (currently about three hours in) but the narration is terrible. The narrator sounds like she's struggling with the different voices (especially the child) and just sounds strained. Its not enough to disrupt the story which is brilliant, but it does get annoying from time to time.