"We both know you can't tell your own story without exposing someone else's."

In London, a renowned mystery author goes missing for 11 days in December 1926 after an argument with her unfaithful husband, Archibald Christie. This novel is the author's envisioning of the mysterious unresolved event. The story is narrated in the first person who happens to be Nan but alternating timelines from her youth to where she is now, blatantly flaunting herself in the Christie home as an assistance to Archie. His dalliances were not exactly a well-kept secret so when he told her he was spending the weekend away, Agatha had no disillusions that he would be with Miss Nan O'Dea.

Mrs. Christie's disappearance remains up to debate as to what occurred although she was eventually "found" at a day spa hotel not too far from home. The rumors ranged from her having dementia, amnesia, pulling a publicity stunt to wanting to harm herself. The ribbon which ties the story together in this case is Nan O'Dea and how she came to be in the circle of the elite. Her background is filled with as much mystique and mystery as those of the Christie's. It is obvious that Nan both admired and loathed Agatha for her success and marriage to Archie.

"Agatha Christie had a fascination with murder. But she was tenderhearted. She never wanted to kill anyone. Not for a moment. Not even me."

This is Nan's story of ambition and desire to climb over other people in order to obtain her rags to riches ending. ( )

Book on CD performed by Lucy Scott
3.5***

On December 3, 1926, Agatha Christie drove away from her home after an argument with her husband. Her car was found at the edge of a chalk pit, and it was feared she had drowned herself. A nation-wide (perhaps international) search began for her. She was found eleven days later, claiming to have no memory of the time she spent away from home. All this is true. In this fascinating novel, Nina de Gramont imagines what happened to Mrs Christie during that time period.

This is a novel about marriage, about motherhood, about love, about grief, about how society punishes those who fail to follow the rules, about forgiveness and justice.

De Gramont took the story in a direction I wasn’t expecting, and at first, I was unhappy about the focus being NOT on Agatha Christie’s disappearance, but on her husband’s mistress. But eventually the stories of these two women merge in an unexpected fashion that fascinated me.

Lucy Scott does a marvelous job of narrating this audiobook. I was sometimes confused about who was speaking, especially at the beginning, until I recognized the author’s choice of first-person narrator. But that is not Scott’s fault. ( )

I started THE CHRISTIE AFFAIR with the wrong expectation. I expected this to be a reimagining of Agatha Christie's 11 days when she went missing. While that's true, THE CHRISTIE AFFAIR is even more about Christie's first husband's mistress, Nan. She is really the main character, and she tells the story that is so full of thrilling twists and turns, I enjoyed it more than I ever enjoyed an Agatha Christie novel.

Christie's first husband is spoiled and selfish and wants to dump her in favor of Nan. So your immediate impression of Nan isn't meant to be a good one. However, that will soon change with her story of hardship and romance with an Irish boy/man.

And then there are all the secrets. Four people, including Christie, know what really happened during those 11 days. But everyone keeps her secret because she is keeping their secrets of murder and deception.

As Nan also tells it, Christie, too, has a romance during her 11 missing days. Are her and Nan's romances doomed, or can Nan rewrite the ending?

NOTE: Several other reviews of this book complain that Nan couldn't possibly have known everything she wrote about what happened during the 11 days.This may be their reading comprehension. Nan says more than once that she IMAGINES much of what happened based on what the others told her. ( )

My book club read this book for October 2023. We meet today to discuss it. I'm sure we'll have a lively discussion.

I'm sure the ten day disappearance of Agatha Christie in the 1920s is not news to anyone who reads. Although Christie became a prolific writer of murder mysteries and her books continue to be read and made into films and TV series and plays, she was just at the start of her career when she disappeared in December 1926. As in this book, the disappearance was triggered by her husband Archie asking for a divorce so he could marry his mistress. From that juncture on this book is pure fiction. In the book Agatha is stopped by a young Irishman as she drives away from her home. He is Finbarr Mahoney and he was the lover of Nan O'Dea, Archie Christie's mistress. At the end of World War I Nan got pregnant with Finbarr's child and went to Ireland to tell him, expecting they would be wed. Instead, Finbarr was ill with the Spanish flu and his father took Nan to a Catholic home for unwed mothers. Finbarr never learned that Nan had come until she had the baby and, against her wishes, it was placed for adoption. Later when he found out he wanted Nan to emigrate to Australia with him but Nan was determined to find their child, a daughter she called Genevieve. Nan wrote to Finbarr in Australia to tell him she was marrying Archie Christie and he came to England determined to stop her. They all end up in Yorkshire where Nan has gone to a spa hotel for a short vacation. Agatha and Finbarr stay in a vacant home near the hotel and Finbarr makes contact with Nan. Agatha Christie's disappearance is big news and police across the country are searching for her. A recently retired detective, Chilton, is called back to service to check around the Harrogate area of Yorkshire. He is staying at the same hotel as Nan but, at first, he doesn't know the connection between her and the missing writer. He does manage to find Mrs. Christie but before he can convince her to return home she disappears again. Then two mysterious deaths at the hotel occur and Chilton is tasked to help determine if they are accidents or something else. Chilton is no Hercule Poirot but he does have a fine mind for noticing things and drawing conclusions. The truth about the deaths came as a huge surprise to me. Eventurally, Agatha returns home but soon separates from Archie and he marries Nan.

Nan's back story explains her motive for marrying Archie but it would be a massive spoiler if I went into that. Suffice it to say that I think she continued to love Finbarr but couldn't be with him. Agatha also remarried and it appears to have been happy although it isn't like the ending of this book. I was rather disappointed by that because I think Christie's real life with her archaeologist husband, Max Mallowan, who was much younger than she would have made an interesting epilogue.

I also found a few errors in the book (on one page Nan is sitting with a cup of tea but a few pages over at the same table she has a coffee cup) and that always detracts from a book, in my opinion. Another plot point that was never explained was how Finbarr knew where Nan was going. It would only have taken a sentence or two to say she put it in her letter or that he talked to someone at her office; I kept expecting that to be revealed and it never was. So, all in all, not a story up to the calibre of Dame Agatha Christie. ( )

3.5/5

Nina de Gramont's The Christie Affair is a fictionalized account of a chapter from the renowned author Ms. Agatha Christies’s own life. On December 3, 1926, Ms. Agatha Christie disappeared from her home leaving her husband and young daughter behind only to resurface eleven days later at a hotel in Harrogate where she had been staying under an assumed name. Needless to say, her disappearance made national news and led to a nationwide search. To this day there is no public knowledge of the events that transpired over those eleven days.

As the story begins we meet Colonel Archibald (Archie) Christie who is embroiled in an affair with Miss Nan O’Dea. Agatha is aware of the relationship between Nan, whom she knows and her husband Archie but remains hopeful that her marriage can be saved.

“She loved her husband. After twelve years of marriage, she loved him blindly and hopefully, as if in her thirty-six years of life she’d learned nothing about the world.”

Archie, leaving on a weekend with Nan, informs Agatha of his intentions to leave her and end their marriage. Shocked and heartbroken, Agatha packs her bags and drives off in her car leaving her daughter with Honoria, her secretary and her daughter’s nanny, and a note for Archie. She is nowhere to be found and subsequently, the discovery of her abandoned car leads to a nationwide search for the missing author. Archie is distraught, the police get involved, the disappearance makes national news with famous figures like Dorothy Sayers and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle also contributing to the efforts. Nan is asked to lay low for sake of public image. She travels to Harrogate and books a stay at the Bellefort Hotel and Spa where we meet a host of interesting characters and another mystery is introduced into the narrative.

The story is narrated by Archie’s mistress Miss Nan O’Dea (a character based on Ms. Nancy Neele who would late become Archie Christie's second wife). The timeline shifts between the past and present with much of the past narrative focused on Nan’s story beginning from her early years with her family in England, summers spent in Ireland on her Uncle’s farm and her first love Finbarr Mahoney and gradually we are made aware of how her past ties in with her relationship with the Christies and the events unfolding in the present. The present-day narrative (also told from Nan’s POV) follows Nan , Agatha and all the other characters through the duration of Ms. Christie’s disappearance.

“In the history of the world there’s been one story a man tells his mistress. He doesn’t love his wife, perhaps never loved her at all. There’s been no sex for years, not a whisper of it. His marriage is absent passion, absent affection, absent joy. A barren and miserable place. He stays for the children, or for money, or for propriety. It’s a matter of convenience. The new lover is his only respite.”

This story, for the most part, revolves around the themes of love, marriage, infidelity and revenge. I found the element of mystery within a mystery quite interesting. In fact, I enjoyed this second mystery (reminiscent of Agatha Christie's work) more than the primary narrative. I would have enjoyed this novel more had there been more focus on Agatha’s story. Though the book is titled "The Christie Affair”, at times it seemed Agatha Christie was in a supporting role with Nan O’ Dea as the protagonist of the novel. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but in which case, I would say the title of the book is more than a tad misleading. Having said that, this is a well written novel with engaging characters and backstories that give us a window into the life and times in pre and post-WWI England, a heartbreaking account of how unwed mothers were treated in the convents of Ireland (there is also a mention of the infamous Magdalene Laundries) and of course an interesting though fictitious take on what the famous author was up to while the whole country was searching for her. ( )