Somehow, I don’t know how, I stopped reading William Boyd over the past decade. Was it the unappealing Armadillo, or the tedious Nat Tate, or the self-indulgent essays in Bamboo? At any rate, Boyd is back with a new publisher, a new novel and his old form.

Restless is that rare pleasure, a story that grips you from the first page and doesn’t let go until the last. Ruth, an irritable single mother and Oxford graduate who is wasting her life teaching English as a second language, has always been told by her own mother, Sally, that