Told ya

William Boyd's Restless -- which I praised by placing it alongside the best of Graham Greene and John le Carre (see in the archives, "I Spy, too") -- has won the Costa Prize in England. You've never heard of the Costa prize because it's actually the old Whitbread, now underwritten by a London (originally Italian) coffee company. It's the second Costa/Whitbread for Boyd, a very rare event (Seamus Heaney, for instance, failed to win his second prize this year), and still a surprising one: Restless is a quiet, graceful spy thriller, not the sort of thing that normally wins big awards.