A Judgement in Stone
A stand-alone novel published by Hutchinson in 1977
I was standing at Liverpool St Station, looking at the departures board, and I thought, what if I couldn’t read? How would I ever know the times of the trains and where they are going? I went up to some official person and said, “what time is there a train to Ipswich?” and he said, “can’t you read?”
Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read or write …
Eunice, the Coverdales’ housekeeper, guns the family down within the space of fifteen minutes one Valentine’s Day. None of them suspected anything. Her motive remained hidden.
As the police investigate, Eunice schemes to escape blame, desperate to preserve the terrible secret of her illiteracy.
But Eunice’s blindness to a crucial aspect of the world throws her plans into jeopardy.
Notes
Abridged into six parts and read by Paul Daneman for BBC Radio 4 in 1986.
Claude Chabrol’s 1995 film adaptation, La Cérémonie, relocates the story to Brittany in France.
Contemporary Reads 2
P.D. James - Death of an Expert Witness
Toni Morrison - Song of Solomon
Colleen McCullough - The Thorn Birds
Stephen King - The Shining
Jonathan Gash - The Judas Pair
William McIlvanney - Laidlaw
Footnotes
Ruth Rendell answers readers questions about A Judgement in Stone for BBC World Book Club in 2003. ↩︎
Book links may earn this site a small commission. ↩︎