The 8:55 to Baghdad: From London to Iraq on the Trail of Agatha Christie and the Orient Express

In 1928, Agatha Christie—the world’s most widely read author—was a thirty-something single mother. With her first marriage falling apart, she has decided to take a much-needed holiday—the Caribbean has been her intended destination, but her mind was changed during a dinner conversation, and five days later she was off on a completely different trajectory.

Merging literary biography with travel adventure, and ancient history with contemporary world events, Andrew Eames tell a riveting tale and reveals fascinating and little-known details of this exotic chapter in the life Agatha Christie. His own trip from London to Baghdad—a journey much more difficult in 2002, with the political unrest in the Middle East, than it was in 1928—becomes ineluctably intertwined with Christie’s, and the characters he meets seem like they could have stepped out of a mystery novel.

Fans of Agatha Christie will delight in Eames’s descriptions of the places and events that appeared in and influenced her fiction, and armchair travelers will thrill in the exotica of the journey itself.