But having teased the reader with the possibility of life-or-death melodrama, Christie jerks the rug from under our feet, restoring Joan to the rest house and to her disturbing thoughts. Because of train delays Joan unexpectedly finds herself held up at an isolated rest station in an area of the Middle Eastern desert. Although I enjoy the television adaptations of Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot stories starring Joan Hickson and David Suchet, I have read very few Christie novels. Dame Agatha Christie, writing as Mary Westmacott, masterfully follows the unfolding of Joan Scudamore's self realization. Dell Family fiction family saga fantasy fiction feminism Feminist fiction First World War First World War novels Germany Gilbert Frankau H.

Her daughter married young, presumably to escape her control, and her son is a bit of a layabout with a questionable reputation. And now, stranded at a train station and all alone with her thoughts for the first time possibly ever, she must reflect on who she really is.A middle aged woman stranded alone in the desert, while waiting for a train, faces herself for the first time and like a Saint has an epiphany about her true self, her husband and children.

The astute story of self deception, complacency,, self satisfaction, judgement, blinkered delusion and the most awful of all, the choice not to act once the veil is lifted. A Goodreads friend kindly sent me a link to the audio version of Absent in the Spring and I was absolutely astonished as I listened to it. Writing anonymously as Mary Westmacott, she also wrote about crimes of the heart, a series of six bittersweet novels with a jagged edge, as compelling and memorable as the best of her work. Just at the right time’, the train arrives that will take her back to Rodney, eager to make her apology and enjoy the personal satisfaction, she believes, of beginning a new life.Also I found the characters, especially Vernon, Jane, and Sebastian, the most compelling of the three. Product Description :- Joan thought her marriage a happy one, her husband a man she could depend on always. She is not consciously selfish or intentionally cruel, but so completely self centered, that all her thoughts, actions and feelings refuse to allow any other point of view than her own. The domineering Miss Gilbey at her school, the undisciplined schoolmate Blanche, her long-suffering but empathetic husband Rodney, the disappointment of her son Tony who refused to become a solicitor, the sardonic and satirical criticism of her daughter Averil, the mysterious ‘poisoning’ of her daughter Barbara, the intense suffering of Leslie Sherston, Rodney’s fascination first with Myrna Randolph and later with putting a red rhododendron on Leslie’s grave, her mother’s ‘complete lack of method and consistency’, the resentment at her coldness on the part of a servant, Rodney’s jaunty and carefree walk away from her at the train station: all these ‘lizards’ pop up for Joan’s consideration and allow the reader to see into a soul that is as unsympathetic, personally myopic, egotistical and incapable of any real empathy as any I’ve ever read of in any other work. There was a connection there, a clue, a clue to something that was waiting for her, hiding beneath the silence.

Though I have not read much traditional Agatha Christie this crossed my path as something unique and out of her lane, and possibly self-revelatory?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.