Theo Bennett★ Reader · Lv 2
todayThe best-selling mystery of all time for a reason. I never guessed.
Thriller
And Then There Were None
4.6· 821 ratings
Published 1939222 pagesEnglishIngenious · Chilling
Ten little Soldier Boys went out to dine; One choked his little self and then there were Nine.
Why read it
Ten strangers are lured to a remote island off the Devon coast, each by a different pretext, by a host none of them has ever met. Over dinner, a recorded voice accuses every one of them of getting away with murder, and then, one by one, they start to die.
The premise
Cut off from the mainland with no way to escape and no visible killer, the guests realize the deaths are following the lines of an old nursery rhyme, and that the murderer must be one of them. As paranoia tightens and the count drops, the puzzle becomes not just who is guilty but who is still alive. It is Christie's tightest and most audacious closed-circle mystery.
The story behind it
Agatha Christie published this novel in 1939. It is her best-selling book and one of the best-selling novels of all time, with well over 100 million copies sold. Christie herself considered it among her most difficult to write, and it has been adapted countless times for stage, film, and television.
What awaits inside
- 01
The perfect closed circle
With no outside suspects and no escape, the book distills mystery to its purest form: a solvable trap.
- 02
Guilt without law
Each victim escaped justice for a real crime, raising the uneasy question of who deserves to be punished.
- 03
Paranoia as engine
What awaits is the dread of watching allies turn to suspects as the survivors turn on each other.
- 04
A rhyme as blueprint
The nursery verse that predicts each death turns the whole island into a ticking, patterned machine.
From the book
The ten guests sitting frozen at dinner as a hidden gramophone recording accuses each of them, by name, of murder.
The set of ten little china soldier figurines on the dining table, which vanish one at a time as each guest dies.
4.6
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