The Christie Affair Paperback – 29 Sept. 2022

great story about what could have been during the Christie disappearance really lost myself in the imaginary time and characters

Have read this great lady before just after leaving school. Some 40 years ago but but made my mind to read again this seems a good book to start

The storyline was good, but difficult to follow at times because the author chose to write it from the mistress point of view….except she sometimes seemed to forget and revert to third party. As an Agatha Christie fan I was disappointed, since this wasn’t really about Agatha at all, and felt it was insensitive to her living relatives. It was a good enough story to stand up on its own without using Agatha Christie as a character and like another critic I did wonder whether this was done to sell more books!

A masterfully plotted, beautifully written story with absorbing characters and a delightful sense of time and place, I loved every moment of this book.I've always been fascinated by the disappearance of Agatha Christie for 11 days in 1926, so when I heard about this book - telling one possible version of what *might* have happened while she was gone - I knew I had to read it.What I hadn't expected, however, was to become so invested and absorbed in the lives of the other characters in it, especially our narrator, Colonel Christie's mistress, Nan O'Dea.Written from her point of view, but with the benefit of hindsight and plenty of extra information from the other characters, Nan swept me into her world, her mind and her heart and kept me there through the whole book. I found myself caring, desperately, about what was going to happen to her, and because of her.Since it's a book about Christie, of course there's plenty of mystery too, besides Agatha's disappearance. But what I loved most was how all the separate threads woven loosely together at the start, were pulled tight as the story progressed, until you realised - almost too late - that every single thing that has happened since page one was for a reason, and has brought us, perfectly, to The End.

I’m always a little uncomfortable about fiction that is based on real events, but suspend your knowledge of who this is about, and it’s a fast-paced and intriguing novel which spins the lives of all the characters together in a captivating way. The only character who wasn’t sympathetic and utterly three-dimensional was Archie Christie, and the book was poorer for it. Nina de Gramont has made everyone else realistic and flawed in a way that makes you empathise and understand the fantastic dynamics of a simple yet complex plot.

Finished in the week

This was quite unexpected in so many ways. The synopsis reads like a thriller but it really isn't. It's far more complex than that. I enjoyed the hopping back and forwards in time and the unreliable narrator very much. The layers of plot were well balanced and even though I wasn't always sure where I was going to end up, I very much enjoyed the journey.

Having never read an Agatha Christie book it is a mystery to me as to why I was so intrigued to read The Christie Affair – a story based loosely around the 11 days of Agatha Christie’s life when she went missing…but intrigued I was.In this absolutely enigmatic tale Nina de Gramont fills in what happened during those 11 days and paints a whole other side to who Agatha Christie was. Whilst this is a fictional account, the story that Nina de Gramont poses – her ‘what if…?’ actually seems very plausible. She factors in socio-economical factors, historical elements and then throws in a murder mystery in this melting pot of ideas and all together it makes a pretty damn fine story.I know this is fictional but I kind of want it to be real.The Christie Affair is definitely in my top ten books of the year so far.The Christie Affair by Nina de Gramont is available now.