Eleven Days - by Laura Thompson (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

A unique approach to understanding Agatha Christie's infamous eleven-day disappearance, from the New York Times bestselling author of the Edgar-nominated Agatha Christie.

In December of 1926, Agatha Christie, the world's most famous mystery author, vanished. Eleven days later, after frenzied media speculation, she was discovered alive and well. Claiming to have lost her memory, she gave one disingenuous newspaper interview in 1928, but otherwise refused to speak publicly about her disappearance. A century on, there are questions that have never been answered. The book penetrates the blank space in Christie's long and brilliant life, which leaves her ever more emblematic of the genre that she defines.

Eleven Days is an examination of a myth, of a Christie mystery that has remained tantalizingly unsolved. In a new approach, Laura Thompson undertakes a re-enactment of Christie's movements: from the moment of driving away from her marital home, to the abandonment of her car and her arrival the following night at a hotel in the north of England. Based on Thompson's conversations with people close to Christie - notably, her interviews with Christie's only child, her daughter Rosalind -Eleven Days will examine what lay behind this event, including some entirely new information about Christie's first marriage.

Thompson explores all theories about Christie's disappearance, as well as the notion of disappearance in itself: how it might feel to wander like a ghost through one's own life, to be oneself yet without identity. What sort of person has the capacity to disappear? Many of us may have longed to do so, but actually to go through with it? What courage or daring does it take, what desperation or deviousness? And how was Agatha Christie changed by it?

Eleven Days delves into these questions and delivers the final word on the greatest mystery ever created by the greatest writer of mysteries.

About the Author

LAURA THOMPSON won the Somerset Maugham award for her first book, The Dogs, and is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Six: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters. Other books include the critically-acclaimed Life in a Cold Climate, a biography of Nancy Mitford; the Crime Writers' Association Award-nominated Rex v Edith Thompson; and Agatha Christie: A Mysterious Life.

She has appeared in several Christie documentaries, including Inside the Mind of Agatha Christie (PBS).