Eleven Days by Laura Thompson

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 refused to speak publicly about her disappearance, and even today, there are questions that have never been answered. The book will seek to penetrate 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 unsolved for a century. In a new approach, Laura Thompson undertakes a re-enactment of Christie’s movements based on her own conversations with people close to Christie: notably, her interviews with Christie’s only child, her daughter Rosalind.

Thompson explores all theories and aspects of 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? How was Agatha Christie changed by it?

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