During research for Any Human Heart, William Boyd became very interested in WWII espionage and the thrill of the life of a spy, which inspired his novel Restless.
Restless pulls you deep into the obscure, forgotten intricacies of wartime espionage, in particular the covert operations run by the British in America before Pearl Harbor. William was intrigued by Ian Fleming’s James Bond stories and drew elements from his sly spy to add into Eva.
Eva works for a unit attached to British Security Co-ordination, which ran one of the biggest-ever British covert operations from room 3603 in the Rockefeller Centre. While she ultimately triumphs, the moral of the story is once a spy, always a spy.
While William went into the project wanting to write a novel about a spy, he retrospectively sees it more as a story of identity, and discovering who someone really is. ‘We’re not the same person, we’re a progression of selves.’
