Come, tell me how you live

A first-person account of the seasons Agatha Christie spends in Syria and Iraq during the 1930s, accompanying her second husband, the archaeologist Max Mallowan, on his digs across the Tells of the Khabur and Balikh valleys. Christie sets aside detection entirely and turns instead to the everyday texture of expedition life: bargaining for a house in Beirut, assembling supplies, recruiting and managing workmen, enduring breakdowns of cars and tempers, and washing, sorting, and cataloguing the pottery and small finds the dig produces. She sketches the people around her with warmth and humour, from the temperamental cook to the architects and assistants who share the camp, and she observes the landscape, the local communities, and the rhythms of fieldwork with an outsider's curiosity rather than a scholar's authority. In her foreword she insists the book offers no grand descriptions, economics, or history, only small doings and happenings. Written largely during the Second World War, when Mallowan was posted abroad and she was living through the bombing of London, the memoir is shaped by longing for those peaceful, sunlit years and reads as an affectionate backward glance. The result is one of the few non-fiction works she published, a light and self-deprecating record of marriage, travel, and the patient, dusty labour of uncovering the past.