The Moonstone (1000 Books to Read)

So fast-paced and fun to read! A true page-turner.

Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:

James Mustich

Jul 31, 2018

While the plot of The Moonstone is compelling, it is the play of its distinctive voices upon our understanding of events that makes the book truly absorbing. Clues are laid out carefully and, in retrospect at least, quite tellingly, but their meaning is obscured as we read by the shifting perspectives and personalities of the narrators. In the same way, the exoticism of the diamond that is the story’s catalyst disguises Collins’s real invention in domesticating the melodrama of the Gothic tale and inviting its titillating energy into recognizable drawing rooms, thus laying the table for Agatha Christie and countless other novelists who would set murderous puzzles close to home. Psychological acuity, formal virtuosity, the social and human amplitude of a Victorian novel, and the narrative pulse of a thriller add up to make The Moonstone the prototype of “the book you can’t put down.”