Absent in the Spring by Mary Westmacott
Published: 1944 | Series: Standalone, one of Agatha Christie's six novels written under her "Mary Westmacott" pseudonym.
Stranded between trains on a journey back from the Middle East to England, smug, self-satisfied Joan Scudamore finds herself reflecting upon her life, her family, and finally coming to grips with the uncomfortable truths about her life.
About Mary Westmacott (aka Agatha Christie)
Agatha Christie wrote six romantic novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott between 1930 and 1956, exploring psychological depth and emotional complexity beyond the conventions of detective fiction. These introspective works examined love, loss, and human relationships with greater intimacy. Christie kept the pen name secret for years.
The Story (spoiler free)
Joan Scudamore is a self-satisfied, middle class English woman traveling back home from visiting her married daughter in Baghdad. Owing to some bad weather, she misses a connection and has to wait for an unknown number of days at a remote rest-house on the Turkish border until the next train can get through. She quickly finishes the small amount of reading material she has with her and runs out of writing paper. There is nothing to do and nobody to talk to, beyond the staff who have no interest in engaging with her.
For the first time in her life, she has nothing but her own mind to fill her days. She takes desultory walks in the surrounding desert, reliving happy memories of her wonderful husband, lovely children, and attentive neighbours. But the more she thinks about her life, the more she comes to realise that she has been living in a smug, self-centred bubble, absolutely unaware of what is really going on around her or how her loved ones really feel. The longer she spends alone, the more acute the revelations she has. This book is an intense and fascinating psychological portrait.
"In my time exploring the Mary Westmacott novels, I found that they deepened my understanding of Christie’s work as a whole. There is sometimes a tendency to dismiss Agatha Christie somehow as a lightweight writer and acclaim her only as a master of clever plotting. But I think these six novels demonstrate that there was a lot more to her skill than just ingenuity with alibis or motives." Mary Westmacott episode, 2020
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