'A smart and highly entertaining portrait of a literary powerhouse'

• THE TIMES BOOKS OF THE YEAR

'A riveting portrait'

• GUARDIAN BOOKS OF THE YEAR

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'Worsley's sparkling biography brings a fresh eye to Christie's life and work, firmly busting the myth that she, or her novels, were cosy.' Daily Mail

'Every Christie fan should read this' - The Times

'Shows the Queen of Crime in a new light.' - Daily Telegraph

'Worsley's book excels in bringing a broader historical perspective to Christie's life and work, and her enthusiasm is infectious.' - Observer

'Nobody in the world was more inadequate to act the heroine than I was.'

Why did Agatha Christie spend her career pretending that she was 'just' an ordinary housewife, when clearly she wasn't? 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 which had its own rules about what women could and couldn't do. Lucy Worsley's biography is not just of an internationally renowned bestselling 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 is both authoritative and entertaining and makes us realise what an extraordinary pioneer Agatha Christie was - truly a woman who wrote the twentieth century.