Nevertheless, his story circles intelligently around fascinating themes. A gripping, well-paced narrative is occasionally shaken by bad writing but that sporadic failure is overcome by the considerable force of Boyd's narrative imagination. This is a novel about our pasts, and the way they never really leave us. It's the story of Sally Gilmartin, a mild-mannered Oxfordshire widow who, in the hot summer of 1976 reveals her true identity to her daughter Sally is really Eva Delectorskaya, a Russian émigrée and former WWII spy. Both watermarks of his style are present in Restless. Previous novels - Any Human Heart, The New Confessions - attest, also, to Boyd's particular concern for the shape and texture of a whole life. A generator, above all else, of narrative energy. Not for Boyd the high linguistic technique of Martin Amis or the elegiac understatement of Ishiguro he is known, instead, as a maker of richly imagined, and, yes, good, old-fashioned stories. William Boyd's reputation, won over a career spanning eight novels before this latest, is that of English fiction's master story-teller.
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