‘My dear home, my nest, my house’: these words from a 1958 song by Jules Bruyère, with which Agatha Christie opened her autobiography, sum up the importance of home to her. She also wrote: ‘What I liked playing with as a child I have liked playing with later in life. Houses for instance.’ She also lovingly included descriptions of houses (especially ‘her’ houses) in her books.

Hilary Macaskill examines the houses that meant most to Agatha Christie, including her childhood home, Ashfield, in Torquay; Winterbrook in Oxfordshire, and, above all, Greenway, soaring above the River Dart and Agatha’s favourite home from 1938 to the end of her life in 1976 (though requisitioned in the Second World War by the Admiralty, and from 1943 to 1945 home also to the United States Coast Guard).

The author also explores more temporary abodes, not only a succession of flats and houses in London (mainly in Kensington and Chelsea) but also the homes she set up at the digs in the Middle East that she travelled to with her archaeologist husband, Max Mallowan, and the hotels – notably the Moorland Hotel on Dartmoor, to which she adjourned in the grip of writer’s block to complete her first detective novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, and the Burgh Island Hotel, a major inspiration for And Then There Were None and Evil Under the Sun.

Hilary Macaskill  examines the houses that meant the most to Woolf, including:

22 Hyde Park Gate, London – where Virginia Woolf was born in 1882

Talland House, St Ives, Cornwall – the summer home of Virginia’s family until 1895

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, London – the birthplace of the Bloomsbury Group – Virginia lived here from 1904 to 1912

Hogarth House, Richmond, London  – where the newly married Woolfs set up home and founded the Hogarth Press

Asheham House, East Sussex – the summer home of the Woolfs, 1912-1919

52 Tavistock Square, London  – a return to Bloomsbury, the heart of London

Monk’s House, Rodmell, East Sussex -   where Virginia lived from 1919 until her death in 1941