"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 a picturesque Cotswold village; Eva Delectorskaya was a rigorously trained World War II spy. Three decades later, someone is trying to kill Sally and at last Ruth, now a young single mother with an unfinished graduate degree and escalating dependence on alcohol, is drawn into her mother's dark past.

William Boyd is the author of eight novels, including A Good Man in Africa and Any Human Heart, three collections of short stories, and twelve screenplays. He has won several awards, including the Whitbread Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. He lives with his wife in London and southwest France.