Berk Worms 2026 - 19th Century Classic Novel

Welcome to our Berk Worms 🐛 book club. Each month we all aim to read the same book from a particular genre and then meet to discuss it. We also then talk about other books we are reading. All are welcome!

Our book for discussion in May is a 19th Century classic by Wilkie Collins. We are reading ‘The Moonstone’ published in 1868. William Wilkie Collins was an English novelist, playwright, and short story writer. His best-known works are The Woman in White (1859), No Name (1862), Armadale (1866), and The Moonstone (1868), considered the first modern English detective novel. The novel is available in all formats including Kindle and Audio Book. It runs at 387 pages but this can vary depending on which edition you are reading.

About the novel for Discussion:

The Moonstone, a yellow diamond looted from an Indian temple and believed to bring bad luck to its owner, is bequeathed to Rachel Verinder on her eighteenth birthday. That very night the priceless stone is stolen again and when Sergeant Cuff is brought in to investigate the crime, he soon realizes that no one in Rachel’s household is above suspicion. Suspicion falls on a hunchbacked housemaid, on Rachel's cousin Franklin Blake, on a troupe of mysterious Indian jugglers, and on Rachel herself.

The phlegmatic Sergeant Cuff is called in, and with the help of Betteredge, the Robinson Crusoe-reading loquacious steward, the mystery of the missing stone is ingeniously solved.

Critical views:

Hailed by T. S. Eliot as ‘the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels’, "The Moonstone" is a marvellously taut and intricate tale of mystery, in which facts and memory can prove treacherous and not everyone is as they first appear.

“Probably the very finest detective story ever written." - Dorothy Sayers

Reading Ahead:

12 May 2026: 19th Century Classic - we are reading The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
June: Crime Fiction novel to be selected in April meet up

Happy reading, 🐛Cazza