The style is leisurely, intimate and very stream-of-consciousness as Joan becomes increasingly plagued by self-doubt. I also wonder how related were Joan's thoughts to Christie's own musings during her 1926 disappearance. This is the blog for Sheffield Hallam University's collection of popular fiction published and enjoyed between 1900-1950. I saw a couple of the covers and assumed they were fluffy romance novels and was only slightly interested.

Philip Temple is an award-winning author of fiction and non-fiction for both adults and children, often on the subjects of New Zealand history and the natural world. No, she had qualified it afterwards – she had said, ‘You’ve stayed where you were – a St Anne’s girl who’s been a credit to the school. A chance meeting was all very well but she had grave doubts about sustaining the pose of friendship all the way across Europe. This psychological tension is ratcheted tighter and tighter as Joan remembers past instances from her life. This is a novel that is closely based on one of the parables in St Luke's Gospel - the pharisee and the tax collector who are praying in the temple.

Additionally, she is astutely aware of Joan’s discomfiture, which she speaks about plainly, then goes on to say that bad weather is coming, and Joan may get held up by it. She also has crossed paths incidentally with another (fallen) society woman who is now living an authentic life on her own terms after leaving her husband for another man. Joan Scudmore has it all; she looks good for her age, has a handsome husband with happy children, a respectable house and a good name, but when she is stuck at a desert outpost on the way back to England she is forced to retrace the past. Joan is stranded at a desert way station while on her way back from visiting her daughter in Baghdad. The reader is enticed to gather all the clues of this life, especially the details in between the lines, to put together the picture of this woman and her influence, like an investigation.

Es un libro distinto al género que me más gusta, el políciaco, a pesar de haber sido escrito por Agatha Christie (bajo un pseudonimo); sin embargo, me hizo pensar en cómo vemos el mundo, cómo el mundo nos ve y como esas dos versiones no coinciden en muchas ocasiones. Beresford's review in The Guardian of 25 August 1944 concluded, "It is a very clever and consistently interesting study of a character that not even a desert vision could permanently change. She was still writing to great acclaim until her death, and her books have now sold over a billion copies in English and another billion in over 100 foreign languages. It also examines the interplay between duty and happiness, and the temptation of living vicariously through one’s children.While the storylines included unsavory characters and immoral behavior, each of these stories challenged the reader to think more deeply within about how various decisions made in life affect others. One can’t help wondering if Agatha felt something similar when her fist husband left her, turning her life upside down. Another reviewer, said the book made her profoundly uncomfortable, and that's probably what it was supposed to do. Her domineering character has made miserable the lives of her husband, children, friends and servants.

S. Lewis, "the sort of woman who lives for others - you can tell the others by their hunted expression.Somebody please tell me that I'm not the only one who didn't know that Agatha Christie had an alter ego (Mary Westmacott)! The writing is really good, and the way in which the author has slowly revealed - by going back and forth over certain events in Joan's her husband's and children's lives - the hold Joan has had over the lives of her family, the decisions she has had them make beacuse of how she treats them. This book is in very good condition - small ownership stamp on ffep and inside of back board; slight spottiness to edges and ffep. For the first time in her life, Joan is forced to look inwards and examine her motives, her actions and the effect she has on others.

She reads the books she has brought with her far too quickly and in the days that ensue has nothing to do. Yet Agatha Christie was always a very private person, and though Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple became household names, the Queen of Crime was a complete enigma to all but her closest friends. The central character of this story is a person (usually female) who has appeared several times in the author's detective stories, almost always in the role of the victim: the complete egoist.Y cuando se está abrumado por la pena y los sufrimientos, se tiene la impresión de que nunca se podrá superar todo aquello, de que jamás se logrará salir de aquellas tinieblas para volver a ver la luz del sol. The final chapter contained unexpected elements, but left me dissatisfied having glossed over motivations that were central before. Depois de terminarmos este livro, sem duvida que precisamos mesmo de fazer uma auto-reflexão profunda de quem somos e quem queremos ser.