Agatha Christie at Home

(Hardback)

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"I'm so glad that a new edition is coming! A wonderful, inspirational and essential book for Christie-lovers." Lucy Worsley, author ofAgatha Christie: A Very Elusive Woman(Hodder & Stoughton, 2022)

My dear home, my nest, my house: these words from a 1958 song by Jules Bruyere, with which Agatha Christieopened her autobiography, sum up the importance of home to her. She also wrote: What I liked playing with as a child I have liked playing with later in life. Houses for instance. She also lovingly included descriptions of houses (especially her houses) in her books.

Hilary Macaskill examines the houses that meant most to Agatha Christie, including her childhood home, Ashfield, in Torquay; Winterbrook in Oxfordshire, and, above all, Greenway, soaring above the River Dart and Agathas favourite home from 1938 to the end of her life in 1976 (though requisitioned in the Second World War by the Admiralty, and from 1943 to 1945 home also to the United States Coast Guard).

The author also explores more temporary abodes, not only a succession of flats and houses in London (mainly in Kensington and Chelsea) but also the homes she set up at the digs (mostly in the Middle East) that she travelled to with her archaeologist husband, Max Mallowan, and the hotels notably the Moorland Hotel on Dartmoor, to which she adjourned in the grip of writers block to complete her first detective novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, and the Burgh Island Hotel, a major inspiration for And Then There Were None and Evil Under the Sun.

Reviews

A must for Christie fans but also a good read for those interested in the social history and interiors of a bygone age. Country Life

Author Bio

Hilary Macaskill is a journalist and travel writer.She is co-authorwith Molly WoodofDownhill All the Way: Walking with Donkeys on the Stevenson Trail(Frances Lincoln, 2006),and has written, as well asAgatha Christie at Home,Charles Dickens at Home(Frances Lincoln, 2012),Daphne du Maurier at Home(Frances Lincoln, 2013) and Virginia Woolf at Home (Pimpernel Press, 2019). She lives in London.

Mathew Prichard is Agatha Christie's grandson, and was, until he handed over the reins to his son, the chairman of Agatha Christie Limited.