It opens in June 1904 Dublin, on the sixteenth, the day Nora and Jim meet, a day he commemorates as Bloomsday when his epic is finally published by Sylvia Beach in 1922. Galway-born, bold as brass Nora Barnacle, model for Molly Bloom in her husband’s “Ulysses,” narrates this biographical novel in which she tries to balance her intense desire for Jim with the perpetual anxiety of living in poverty, first as a couple, and then with their children, Giorgio and Lucia.

Nora: A Love Story of Nora and James Joyce Through the letters that Nina and Estelita write to each other we learn of the chase to extricate Nina from Mexico and the harrowing months that follow spent in Cuba during the height of the revolution.Ī tender narrative of a star’s rise and fall and the unbreakable bond between mother and daughter. In 1958, when Nina is home for the summer and experiences a trauma, she is kidnapped by her father. The demands of the film industry force Estelita to send Nina to boarding school.

Intrepid and talented, Estelita leaves her husband and moves to Los Angeles with her mother and Nina where she signs a movie deal and works with John Wayne, Dean Martin and Angie Dickinson. There she met singer Chu Chu Martinez and by 18 wed him and moved to Mexico City with their six-week-old daughter, Nina, forced to abandon her musical career. By the time she was 15, she travelled with her mother to NYC to perform at the Copacabana. When she was only 9, Estelita Rodriguez (1928-1966) sang frequently in a Havana nightclub. Yet, Benedict reminds readers that “we are all unreliable narrators of our own lives, crafting stories about ourselves that omit unsavory truths and highlight our invented identities.” Chapters alternate between the story of Agatha Miller meeting handsome pilot Archibald Christie in 1912 and a memoir written throughout 1926 in which Agatha plants clues to her disappearance as well as revealing her knowledge of the “latent danger of the dispensary” from her volunteer nursing work during WWI as well as her husband’s philandering. Claiming amnesia, Christie never disclosed her whereabouts.īenedict has richly imagined what transpired throughout those days during which Christie reconciles herself to the facts of her broken marriage.

Accounts from strangers of “sightings” eventually lead to her discovery. Her disappearance sparked an unprecedented manhunt that involved over a thousand police officers, airplanes, and the specialist knowledge of fellow crime writers Dorothy Sayers and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Her abandoned Morris Cowley was found near a small, dark spring-filled lake in Surrey, her fur coat left inside. In December 1926, up-and-coming doyenne of detective fiction, Agatha Christie went missing for 11 days.

The mystery of mrs christie ending