This book was interesting – one part historical fiction, one part mystery and based on a true story. Check out my review of The Christie Affair!
The Christie Affair by Nina de Gramont
Published on February 1, 2022 by St. Martins Press.
Every story has its secrets.
Every mystery has its motives.
Synopsis: The greatest mystery wasn’t Agatha Christie’s disappearance in those eleven infamous days, it’s what she discovered.
London, 1925: In a world of townhomes and tennis matches, socialites and shooting parties, Miss Nan O’Dea became Archie Christie’s mistress, luring him away from his devoted and well-known wife, Agatha Christie.
The question is, why? Why destroy another woman’s marriage, why hatch a plot years in the making, and why murder?
How was Nan O’Dea so intricately tied to those eleven mysterious days that Agatha Christie went missing?
What else has Nina de Gramont written?
It looks like she’s written two YA books, Every Little Thing in the World (2010) and The Boy I Love (2014), and two women’s fiction novels, Meet Me at The River (2012) and Late September (2015).
The Christie Affair was picked as a Reese’s Book Club selection.
Review of The Christie Affair
My mom was a huge Agatha Christie fan. I remember her telling me about the movie Agatha, starring Dustin Hoffman and Vanessa Redgrave, that looked into her disappearance.
The known facts are these: during a time when Christie was reeling from the death of her mother, her husband Archie’s infidelity, and his request for a divorce, Agatha Christie crashed her car and vanished for eleven days, turning up at a hotel where she had registered using the last name of her husband’s mistress. When she was found, she claimed not to remember what happened.
The Christie Affair is a somewhat different story. It’s one part historical fiction, one part mystery, one part women’s fiction. It takes the sparse details of Christie’s disappearance and imagines a new story around them, a story focusing on Archie’s mistress and her backstory.
At first I wasn’t really sure about The Christie Affair
The story is narrated by Nan, Archie’s mistress, who in a pretty omniscient point of view, seems to know all the intimate details of Agatha Christie’s life.
To be fair, she is not only the mistress, but part of the Christie’s social circle.
The other issue I had was that some of the book’s events are strange to the point that they almost seem implausible.
However, by the end of the book, my mind had changed.
Nan had a very interesting and tragic past, and before long I could see how her past was going to collide with the present of the story.
The Christie Affair has very interesting and deeply moving things to say about the nature of love and relationships.
The story cleverly takes a very unsympathetic character, Nan, and by the end makes her into someone the reader is rooting for.
It’s very hard to discuss this one without spoilers, so I have a Spoiler Review and Discussion Post for The Christie Affair. I hope you’ll stop by if you a) want spoilers or b) have read the book and want to talk about it!
Do you love historical fiction? Then you might want to try this list of books based on historical royals.
And if you do love historical fiction, please drop the names of your favorite titles in the comments!
Wait, there’s a mystery about Agatha Christie? I didn’t know that happened. And to think i just thought of her as a writer but the fact she went missing is insane. It’s easy to see why someone would write a book surrounding that whole affair because it is dying for someone to create their own story.
YES she went missing for real and there was a lot of speculation about why (publicity stunt, nervous breakdown after the death of her mother and her husband wanting to leave her for another woman.)
If you want a book more focused on Agatha herself, this might not be the one for you. There have been a couple of movies about it: The Mysterious Case of Agatha Christie (Showtime), Agatha (from the 1970s and on Amazon Prime). There’s a book called The Mystery of Mrs. Christie that came out a couple of years ago, but I haven’t read it.