Agatha Christie
A Mysterious Life
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Narrated by:
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Pearl Hewitt
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By:
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Laura Thompson
About this listen
2019 Edgar Award Finalist for Best Critical/Biographical work
The author of the New York Times bestselling The Six now turns her formidable biographical skills to the greatest crime writer in the world, Agatha Christie.
It has been one hundred years since Agatha Christie wrote her first novel and created the formidable Hercule Poirot. A brilliant and award-winning biographer, Laura Thompson now turns her sharp eye to Agatha Christie. Arguably the greatest crime writer in the world, Christie’s books still sell over four million copies each year - more than thirty years after her death - and it shows no signs of slowing.
But who was the woman behind these mystifying, yet eternally pleasing, puzzlers? Thompson reveals the Edwardian world in which Christie grew up, explores her relationships, including those with her two husbands and daughter, and investigates the many mysteries still surrounding Christie’s life, most notably, her eleven-day disappearance in 1926.
Agatha Christie is as mysterious as the stories she penned, and writing about her is a detection job in itself. With unprecedented access to all of Christie’s letters, papers, and notebooks, as well as fresh and insightful interviews with her grandson, daughter, son-in-law and their living relations, Thompson is able to unravel not only the detailed workings of Christie’s detective fiction, but the truth behind this mysterious woman.
©2018 Laura Thompson (P)2018 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"Pearl Hewitt's sweet, crisp English voice adds extra pleasure to her fine narration of this recent biography of the famous English mystery writer Agatha Christie.... Her clear, musical timbre sounds just right for Christie's era and class, and her attentive pacing keep one attuned to Thompson's interesting analyses. A win for Christie's biggest fans." (AudioFile)
Featured Article: The Essential Guide to Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie is the best-selling fiction writer of all time, with more than 2 billion books sold. She's also the most translated author in history, and her stage play The Mousetrap holds the world record for longest initial run. (It has been running at the St Martin's Theatre in London for 68 straight years!) Whether you're a longtime reader or new fan, this list offers some of the best Agatha Christie books to listen to—and a handy guide to the author herself.
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World’s End
- The Lanny Budd Novels, Book 1
- By: Upton Sinclair
- Narrated by: Bronson Pinchot
- Length: 26 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Lanning “Lanny” Budd spends his first 13 years in Europe, living at the center of his mother’s glamourous circle of friends on the French Riviera. In 1913, he enters a prestigious Swiss boarding school and befriends Rick, an English boy, and Kurt, a German. The three schoolmates are privileged, happy, and precocious - but their world is about to come to an abrupt and violent end. When the gathering storm clouds of war finally burst, raining chaos and death over the continent, Lanny must put the innocence of youth behind him.
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didn't finish
- By Bird Miller on 05-08-22
By: Upton Sinclair
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Diana
- Her True Story - in Her Own Words
- By: Andrew Morton
- Narrated by: Michael Maloney, Caroline Langrishe
- Length: 13 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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The sensational biography of Princess Diana, now revised to commemorate the 20th anniversary of her death. When Diana: Her True Story - in Her Own Words was first published in 1992, it forever changed the way the public viewed the British monarchy.
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Wonderful overall with one issue...
- By globewest on 07-02-17
By: Andrew Morton
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Things I've Been Silent About
- By: Azar Nafisi
- Narrated by: Naila Azad
- Length: 13 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Azar Nafisi, author of the beloved international best seller Reading Lolita in Tehran, now gives us a stunning personal story of growing up in Iran, memories of her life lived in thrall to a powerful and complex mother, against the background of a country's political revolution.
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Family portrait in the frame of history
- By Galina COS on 07-02-16
By: Azar Nafisi
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House of Dreams
- The Life of L.M. Montgomery
- By: Liz Rosenberg, Julie Morstad - illustrator
- Narrated by: Susan Hanfield
- Length: 7 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Once upon a time, there was a girl named Maud who adored stories. When she was fourteen years old, Maud wrote in her journal, "I love books. I hope when I grow up to be able to have lots of them." Not only did Maud grow up to own lots of books, she wrote twenty-four of them herself as L. M. Montgomery, the world-renowned author of Anne of Green Gables. For many years, her lifelong struggles with anxiety and depression, her "year of mad passion" and her difficult married life were buried deep within her unpublished personal journals....
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Home’o’dreams
- By Steve G. on 02-25-20
By: Liz Rosenberg, and others
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Careless People
- Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of the Great Gatsby
- By: Sarah Churchwell
- Narrated by: Kate Reading
- Length: 13 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Since its publication in 1925, The Great Gatsby has become one of the world's best-loved books, delighting audiences across the world. Careless People tells the true story behind F. Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece, exploring in newly rich detail the relation of Fitzgerald's classic to the chaotic world he in which he lived. Fitzgerald set his novel in 1922, and Careless People carefully reconstructs the crucial months during which Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald returned to New York in the autumn of 1922.
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Fascinating study of the Fitzgeralds and Jazz Age
- By Sand on 06-11-14
By: Sarah Churchwell
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Georgette Heyer
- Biography of a Bestseller
- By: Jennifer Kloester
- Narrated by: Phyllida Nash
- Length: 14 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Georgette Heyer remains an enduring international best seller, read and loved by four generations of readers and extolled by today's best-selling authors. Despite her enormous popularity, she never gave an interview or appeared in public. Georgette Heyer wrote her first novel, The Black Moth, when she was 17 in order to amuse her convalescent brother. It was published in 1921 to instant success, and 90 years later it has never been out of print.
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Heyer as a person
- By Jerri C on 06-15-15
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Wallis in Love
- The Untold Life of the Duchess of Windsor, the Woman Who Changed the Monarchy
- By: Andrew Morton
- Narrated by: Molly Parker Myers
- Length: 12 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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For fans of the Netflix series The Crown and from the author of the New York Times best seller 17 Carnations comes a captivating biography of Wallis Simpson, the notorious woman for whom Edward VIII gave up the throne.
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This one is being returned
- By Rita T on 02-15-18
By: Andrew Morton
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Effie
- The Passionate Lives of Effie Gray, John Ruskin and John Everett Millais
- By: Suzanne Fagence Cooper
- Narrated by: Sophie Ward
- Length: 12 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Effie Gray, a beautiful and intelligent young socialite, rattled the foundations of England's Victorian age. Married at 19 to John Ruskin, the leading art critic of the time, she found herself trapped in a loveless, union after Ruskin rejected her on their wedding night. She met John Everett Millais, Ruskin's protege, and fell passionately in love with him. Suzanne Fagence Cooper has gained exclusive access to Effie's previously unseen letters and diaries to tell the complete story of this scandalous love triangle.
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Fascinating Story--Victoriana
- By Cariola on 06-29-12
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The Diana Chronicles
- By: Tina Brown
- Narrated by: Rosalyn Landor
- Length: 21 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Diana Chronicles, you will meet a formidable female cast and understand as never before the society that shaped them: among them, Diana's sexually charged mother, her bad-girl sister-in-law, Fergie, and, most formidable of them all, her mother-in-law, the Queen. Add Camilla Parker-Bowles, the ultimate "other woman" into this combustible mix, and it's no wonder that Diana broke out of her royal cage into celebrity culture, where she found her own power and used it to devastating effect.
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One of the best Diana's
- By J F Whitmore on 08-02-12
By: Tina Brown
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Those Wild Wyndhams
- Three Sisters at the Heart of Power
- By: Claudia Renton
- Narrated by: Claudia Renton
- Length: 15 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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They were confidantes to British prime ministers, poets, writers, and artists, their lives entwined with the most celebrated and scandalous figures of the day, from Oscar Wilde to Henry James. They were the lovers of great men - or men of great prominence... They lived in a world of luxurious excess, a world of splendor at 44 Belgrave Square and later at the even more vast Clouds, the exquisite Wiltshire house on 4,000 acres, the "house of the age", designed in 1876 by the visionary architect Philip Webb - the model for Henry James' The Spoils of Poynton.
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SLOW START BUT STICK WITH THIS ONE
- By The Louligan on 01-22-19
By: Claudia Renton
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The Blood Doctor
- By: Barbara Vine
- Narrated by: Robert Powell
- Length: 15 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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The First Lord Nanther, expert in blood diseases, particularly the royal disease of Heamophilia, and favoured physician to Queen Victoria, clearly hoped to be the subject of an admiring posthumous biography. But when his great-grandson, Martin Nanther begins to research his life for a biography, the Martin comes to suspect that his great-grandfather’s old records conceal more than they reveal.
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clever, excellent storytelling
- By connie on 07-09-11
By: Barbara Vine
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So excellent!!!
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On November 7, 1974, a nanny named Sandra Rivett was bludgeoned to death in a Belgravia basement. Veronica, Countess of Lucan, was also attacked. The man named as perpetrator of these crimes, Richard John Bingham, 7th Earl of Lucan, disappeared in the early hours of the following morning. The case, solved in the eyes of the law, has retained its fascination ever since. Laura Thompson narrates the story that led up to that cataclysmic event, and draws on her considerable forensic skills to re-examine the possible truths behind one of postwar Britain's most notorious murders.
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Too Long!
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In The Art of the English Murder, Lucy Worsley explores this phenomenon in forensic detail, revisiting notorious crimes like the Ratcliff Highway Murders, which caused a nationwide panic in the early 19th century, and the case of Frederick and Maria Manning, the suburban couple who were hanged after killing Maria's lover and burying him under their kitchen floor. Our fascination with crimes like these became a form of national entertainment, inspiring novels and plays, prose and paintings, poetry and true-crime journalism.
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Should Come With a Spoiler Alert
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The eldest was a razor-sharp novelist of upper-class manners; the second was loved by John Betjeman; the third was a fascist who married Oswald Mosley; the fourth idolized Hitler and shot herself in the head when Britain declared war on Germany; the fifth was a member of the American Communist Party; the sixth became Duchess of Devonshire. They were the Mitford sisters....
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Don't waste your time.
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Heiresses
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Heiresses: Surely they are among the luckiest women on earth. Are they not to be envied, with their private jets and Chanel wardrobes and endless funds? Yet all too often those gilded lives have been beset with trauma and despair. Before the 20th century a wife’s inheritance was the property of her husband, making her vulnerable to kidnap, forced marriages, even confinement in an asylum. And in modern times, heiresses fell victim to fortune-hunters who squandered their millions.
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tough listen and tough to keep track
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A delight and a revelation
- By theenglishmajor on 12-02-22
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The Mysterious Case of Agatha Christie
- By: Maureen Corrigan, The Great Courses
- Narrated by: Maureen Corrigan
- Length: 5 hrs and 43 mins
- Original Recording
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Meet Agatha Christie, the best-selling novelist in human history. Her writing career spanned six decades, during which time she wrote 66 crime novels, 6 non-crime novels (including romances), and over 150 short stories. Not only was she a phenomenally successful novelist, but she is also the most successful female playwright of all time - her play “The Mousetrap” is the longest-running show in history. As you learn about Christie’s experiences and her storied career, you will better understand how the circumstances of her life shaped her work and vice versa.
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-
So excellent!!!
- By linsyh on 08-24-21
By: Maureen Corrigan, and others
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On November 7, 1974, a nanny named Sandra Rivett was bludgeoned to death in a Belgravia basement. Veronica, Countess of Lucan, was also attacked. The man named as perpetrator of these crimes, Richard John Bingham, 7th Earl of Lucan, disappeared in the early hours of the following morning. The case, solved in the eyes of the law, has retained its fascination ever since. Laura Thompson narrates the story that led up to that cataclysmic event, and draws on her considerable forensic skills to re-examine the possible truths behind one of postwar Britain's most notorious murders.
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Too Long!
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- By: Lucy Worsley
- Narrated by: Anne Flosnik
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Overall
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Performance
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In The Art of the English Murder, Lucy Worsley explores this phenomenon in forensic detail, revisiting notorious crimes like the Ratcliff Highway Murders, which caused a nationwide panic in the early 19th century, and the case of Frederick and Maria Manning, the suburban couple who were hanged after killing Maria's lover and burying him under their kitchen floor. Our fascination with crimes like these became a form of national entertainment, inspiring novels and plays, prose and paintings, poetry and true-crime journalism.
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Should Come With a Spoiler Alert
- By Jessica on 04-15-16
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Don't waste your time.
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tough listen and tough to keep track
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By: Laura Thompson
What listeners say about Agatha Christie
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- GDF
- 07-31-20
Really Enjoyed
Really enjoyed this fine book about a favorite author. Well written and I learned a lot about her life. Highly recommended!
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2 people found this helpful
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- B. Fury
- 03-13-21
Whatva great intro to who Agatha was...
...and now I am goimg to listen to ebery Agatha Christie book Audible has, and read the ones I found at my local used book store
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- Barbara F. Hendren
- 11-04-20
What a Story
I learned so much about Agatha Christie from this book! Excellent performance, in depth research, and very engaging. A real winner!
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- Christine
- 12-26-21
Christine
So enjoyed learning all about an author I absolutely adore! I highly recommend this book!
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- Carol Brennan
- 09-20-21
Masterful blend of history, biography, true crime
Midway through this title and in previous week have lost considerable hours to Laura Thompson’s other books on the Lord Lucan case & the Edith Thompson/Freddie Bywaters executions. The audiobook versions make these compelling and hard to put down, but if Thompson’s ability to weave these stories together—using primary sources, news media coverage, and an especially incisive sociological approach—was not so skilled the audio would expose it. These are phenomenal books, all three of them, and I listen to scads of this stuff weekly (am BBC Radio addict, too). Incomparably recounted tales of the perils women have endured.
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- Betsy Clark
- 09-01-22
Brilliant Biography
So uniquely structured with extensive quotes from her work and letters a very loving, literate, narrative and examination of the written work of Agatha Christie. Be patient. By the time you have finished the book you will have a much deeper understanding of Christie and her work than you might have imagined. Well worth the long listen and beautifully read with a perfect French Poirot in addition to other beautifully characterized letters and quotes. A work of art.
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- DANNY D
- 06-26-23
Awesome
This was an amazing and awesome inside look at her life and all her work!
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- Daniel B.
- 02-17-19
Honest Look at Human Genius
Very readable and informative, an exposition into how ones mind is represented by ones writing. Also a good primer for Agatha Christie Fans. If you love mysteries you have to read this book. Also the reader has a wonderful voice. Spot on to read AC.
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4 people found this helpful
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- KLH
- 11-23-21
Never knew she was this fascinating!
A bit all over the place with timeline and sometimes hard to tell when narrator was quoting a passage from an AC book or just reading her lines, but overall a deliciously long, educational, soothing and fascinating listen. AC was quite a woman, quite a writer and a bit of an enigma! Really enjoyed!
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1 person found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 12-25-20
Suspicious at first, but was drawn in
I’m not typically a biography reader and I can’t quite tell you how this one crossed my path or why in chose 16 hours of Agatha Christie’s life. But I’m glad I did. I love her books but knew nothing of the author. Reading this has rounded out and given her books additional depth. Plus, the narrator is wonderful to listen to.
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6 people found this helpful