基本信息出版社：Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
页码：336 页
出版日期：2007年03月
ISBN：0747589372
条形码：9780747589372
装帧：平装
外文书名：不宁
内容简介 It is 1939. Eva Delectorskaya is a beautiful 28-year-old Russian emigree living in Paris. As war breaks out, she is recruited for the British Secret Service by Lucas Romer, a mysterious Englishman, and under his tutelage she learns to become the perfect spy, to mask her emotions and trust no one, including those she loves most. Since the war, Eva has carefully rebuilt her life as a typically English wife and mother. But once a spy, always a spy. Now she must complete one final assignment, and this time Eva can't do it alone: she needs her daughter's help.
作者简介 William Boyd was born in 1952 in Accra, Ghana and was brought up
there and in Nigeria. He is the author of A Good Man in Africa, which won
the Whitbread Literary Award for the Best First Novel in 1981 and a
Somerset Maugham Award in 1982; On the Yankee Station (1982), a collection
of short stories; An Ice-Cream War, which won the John Llewellyn Rhys
Memorial Prize for 1982 and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Stars and
Bars (1984); The New Confessions (1987); Brazzaville Beach, which won the
James Tait Black Memorial Prize for 1990 and for which William Boyd was
awarded the McVitie's Prize for Scottish Writer of the Year; The Blue
Afternoon, which won the 1993 Sunday Express Book of the Year Award; The
Destiny of Nathalie X, a further collection of short stories, and Any Human
Heart. William Boyd is married and lives in London. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
媒体推荐 From AudioFile
Rosamund Pike's transitions are seamless as she brings together an aging mother's revealing memoir and a plot of revenge involving both the mother and her daughter. Pike's muted tones reflect the puzzlement of daughter Ruth as she discovers that her mother, Sally Gilmartin, was actually Eva Delectorskaya, a Russian ŽmigrŽ, who became Eve Dalton, a spy for the British Secret Service in 1939. Pike's serene account captures Sally's habits of calm watchfulness, learned early and practiced throughout her life as she is caught up in intrigues that challenge her age, intelligence, and training. Most troubling are residual worries that trouble Eve long after she escapes the Secret Service and that make her daughter, and listeners, wonder if her restlessness is inescapable. S.W. 2007 Audies Award Finalist © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.
From Booklist
If an espionage thriller with terror tentacles reaching from pre-World War II to the present can be called a cozy, this is it. Boyd's latest novel moves back and forth from the heart of the British countryside and misty, romantic Edinburgh to prewar Paris and into various capitals during the conflict itself--all with a satisfying, Agatha Christie atmosphere. This is also a mother-daughter story set in 1976, with the daughter of an eccentric mother trying to figure out who wants to kill her mother, Sally Gilmartin. Boyd introduces a rather clunky literary device of having the mother give her daughter a manuscript that details her life as a WWII spy for the British Secret Service. Boyd's focus on Gilmartin's spy training and her behind-the-scenes propaganda work in New York to steer public opinion toward U.S. involvement in the war is fascinating. A somewhat clumsy narrative enlivened by some expertly generated suspense. Connie Fletcher
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
编辑推荐 From Publishers Weekly
When Ruth Gilmartin learns the true identity—and the WWII profession—of her aging mother, Sally Gilmartin, at the start of Boyd's elegant ninth novel (after Any Human Heart), Ruth is understandably surprised. Sally, née Eva Delectorskaya, a Russian émigré living in Paris in 1939, was recruited as a spy by Lucas Romer, the head of a secretive propaganda group called British Security Coordination, to help get America into the war. This fascinating story is well told, but slightly undercut by Ruth's less-than-dramatic life as a single mother teaching English at Oxford while pursuing a graduate degree in history. Ruth's more pedestrian existence can't really compete with her mother's dramatic revelations. The contemporary narrative achieves a good deal more urgency when Ruth's mother recruits her to hunt down the reclusive, elusive Romer. But the real story is Eva/Sally's, a vividly drawn portrait of a minor figure in spydom caught up in the epic events leading up to WWII. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From The New Yorker
Boyd's ninth novel, an absorbing historical thriller, is loosely based on the history of a covert branch of British intelligence created to coax America into the Second World War. The story unfolds on parallel tracks as Sally Gilmartin, born Eva Delectorskaya, a Russian emigree recruited into the British Secret Service in 1939, reveals her clandestine past in an autobiography that she gives to her daughter, Ruth, a graduate student and single mother living a dull civilian life in Oxford in 1976. These installments give the narrative momentum (the accounts of Ruth's daily life drag, by contrast) as Eva describes the taciturn spy who recruited and trained her before becoming her lover; her secret propaganda work in New York; and the act of duplicity, almost deadly, that forced her to flee to England and live under an assumed identity. Ruth barely has time to process the shock of her mother's secret before she is swept into a dangerous game: finding her mother's betrayer before it's too late.
Copyright © 2006 Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
专业书评
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Halfway through William Boyd's entertaining new novel, Restless, Ruth Gilmartin, a single mother living in Oxford, England, muses to herself, "People lead their real, most interesting lives under cover of secrecy." She has good reason to let her thoughts stray in this direction: She's recently discovered that almost everything she knows about her mother, the handsome and spirited 65-year-old British widow, Sally Gilmartin, is an elaborate and long-sustained lie.
For starters, Sally Gilmartin isn't even British. She was born in Moscow and after the Russian Revolution immigrated to France with her father and brother. Her real name is Eva Delectorskaya. In 1939, she was recruited by the British Secret Service and sent to Edinburgh to train. There she perfected her accent, learned an impressive array of mnemonic skills and practiced eluding a six-person team of trained shadows. She put these talents to good use as a British spy during the early years of World War II. Her espionage work was kept meticulously secret. It was also occasionally harrowing.
In 1942, she gave up her intelligence career and returned to Britain, where she married, settled down in Middle Aston and gave birth to Ruth. From this point on, she led an altogether unexceptional life. We learn of the surprising details of Eva's covert past, as Ruth does, in the form of a manuscript that Eva has prepared for her daughter. This manuscript forms half of Restless. The other half is narrated by Ruth Gilmartin and takes place in Oxford in the summer of 1976.
Boyd's primary challenge in this novel is to make both story lines compelling, and, largely, he does. Eva's story is certainly the more eventful one. When we think of World War II British espionage, we expect Eva to prowl the secret corridors of Vichy France or Nazi-occupied Poland. But Boyd sends Eva to a more unexpected and ultimately more interesting destination: America. In upstate New York, Eva works for a group of spies tied to the British Security Coordination. The goal of the BSC is to plant pro-British propaganda in newspapers throughout the world to spur the U.S. government -- and a largely isolationist American population -- into fighting against the Germans. Wars, as we know all too well, are often set in motion on the basis of manipulated intelligence, and Boyd has drawn upon recently revealed historical documents that describe a British spy presence in America of surprising scale and manipulative power.
Of course, there's little in daughter Ruth's life of comparable danger and magnitude. But this doesn't mean that the alternating chapters about her are dull. For one thing, Ruth is an engaging and nicely realized presence. She has her own full existence: a young son, a messy romantic life, unwanted houseguests, a PhD dissertation to finish, a job teaching English as a second language that brings an interesting array of foreign nationals into her Oxford apartment. All these facets are rendered succinctly and skillfully. Perhaps more important, we recognize in Ruth a stubbornness and strength handed down from Eva, who, because of the veiled nature of her spy career, hasn't always been as tender or forthcoming a mother as Ruth would have liked.
This is Boyd's eighth novel and 11th book of fiction, and he has earned a deservedly enthusiastic critical and popular following in Britain and beyond. His characters are vivid and human. He weds the engaging personal lives of his characters to diverse and far-reaching episodes of 20th-century history in a way that feels simultaneously accurate and intimate.
But Restless doesn't have the depth and gravity of the very best spy literature. To reveal Eva's secret life in a self-penned (though expertly polished) manuscript is a somewhat creaky device, and Boyd doesn't always slow down long enough to articulate Eva's complex motivations for sacrificing her safety and integrity for a country not even her own. Still, Restless is a gripping and smartly crafted spy thriller set against a fascinating and largely hidden episode in U.S.-British relations. By this measure, the book is an absorbing success.
Reviewed by John Dalton
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Bookmarks Magazine
Every critic agrees that William Boyd is a shamefully overlooked author on this side of the Atlantic. A powerful storyteller whose novels span genres and continents, Boyd often subtly ruminates on the thin line between private and public life. In Restless he fictionalizes a little-known moment of international espionage while using the conventions of spy thrillers to explore a generation gap. Critics roundly praise Sally's story. It's her daughter's story that's the trouble: a few reviewers find it sorely mismatched with the more dramatic elements of the book. A frequent prizewinner in England (including the Whitbread First Novel Award for A Good Man in Africa), Boyd has yet to catapult to the popularity of the Ian McEwans of the world. Whether Restless is the book to push him into wider renown is up for debate.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.