In the Library
The Moonstone
Wilkie Collins, 1868
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 14 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 48
- Length
- Length 194k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
The light that streamed from it was like the light of the harvest moon.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
The Woman in White
Wilkie Collins
The Woman in White does the same thing, but swaps the diamond for a stolen identity and lets multiple witnesses narrate their own suspicious evidence.
£1.99
The Hound of the Baskervilles
Arthur Conan Doyle
The Hound of the Baskervilles does the same thing, but trades the patient Sergeant for Sherlock Holmes hunting a curse across a foggy English moor.
£1.99
Bleak House
Charles Dickens
Dickens gave English fiction Inspector Bucket over a decade before Sergeant Cuff, hunting a great house's buried secret through the London fog.
£1.99
About the book
A great yellow diamond arrives in the Verinder house as a birthday gift, and by the next morning it is gone from a bedroom nobody could have entered unseen. Wilkie Collins opens on the older theft that cursed the stone, torn from the forehead of a moon god during the storming of Seringapatam, and lets three Brahmin priests trail it across a generation to take it home. What makes the book extraordinary is what happens next: everyone who touched that night gives their own account, each certain of what they saw, none of them seeing the same thing twice. T.S. Eliot called it the first, the longest, and the best of English detective novels, and you can feel why in Gabriel Betteredge, who consults Robinson Crusoe the way other men consult scripture, and in Sergeant Cuff, who would rather discuss roses than murder. The truth, when it finally surfaces, comes from the one place nobody in the house thought to look, and it will send you back through every testimony that came before it, wondering what you missed.