The Moonstone

About the book

A valuable diamond arrives in an English household bearing a history of violence in India. Its disappearance after Rachel Verinder's birthday sets several people to reconstruct events they understand in sharply different ways. Collins gives the investigation a sequence of narrators whose habits, prejudices, loyalties, and comic self-certainties become part of the puzzle. Familiar rooms and small actions acquire new significance as evidence is reconsidered. The mystery concerns possession in more than one sense: an object may be legally inherited while its earlier history remains unresolved. Alongside the search for the stone, the book examines trust between people who cannot explain what they believe they know. Its pleasures lie in both the intricate investigation and the individual voices through which that investigation must pass.

• Possession and empire
• Trust
• Competing accounts

Why read it

For a generous, character-rich mystery that makes the limitations of its narrators essential to the case.

English text