Here's a fascinating account of the life of Agatha Christie from celebrated literary and cultural historian Lucy Worsley, who is perhaps our very favorite BBC presenter.

"Nobody in the world was more inadequate to act the heroine than I was."—Agatha Christie. 

Why did Agatha Christie spend her career pretending that she was “just” an ordinary housewife, when clearly she wasn’t? Her life is fascinating for its mysteries and its passions and, as Lucy Worsley says, "She was thrillingly, scintillatingly modern." She went surfing in Hawaii, she loved fast cars, and she was intrigued by the new science of psychology, which helped her through devastating mental illness.

So why—despite all the evidence to the contrary—did Agatha present herself as a retiring Edwardian lady of leisure? She was born in 1890 into a world that had its own rules about what women could and couldn’t do. Lucy Worsley’s biography is not just of a massively, internationally successful writer. It's also the story of a person who, despite the obstacles of class and gender, became an astonishingly successful working woman.

With access to personal letters and papers that have rarely been seen, Lucy Worsley's biography os both authoritative and entertaining and makes us realize what an extraordinary pioneer Agatha Christie was—truly a woman who wrote the twentieth century.

Plus, hello! This book is written by Lucy Worsley, OBE. She was, until 2024, Chief Curator of the charity Historic Royal Palaces. She also presents THE BEST (that's our personal note) historic documentaries for the BBC and PBS. Her bestselling books include Jane Austen at Home, The Art of the English Murder, and If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home. In 2019, her BBC One program Suffragettes with Lucy Worsley won a BAFTA. She lives in England.

Hardcover, 415 pages. 2022.