100,000+ Books, Games & Puzzles in-stock 🇳🇿

Overnight NZ-wide delivery on in-stock orders 🚀

Madame Midas

Series: Text Classics
3.54 goodreads logo

Ratings/reviews counts are updated frequently.

Check link for latest rating.
( 70 ratings, 12 reviews)
Book Hero Magic crafted this summary to help describe this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Summary
Madame Midas by Fergus Hume is a captivating story set in the Australian goldfields. It follows the life of a wealthy, independent widow, Madame Midas, who navigates the challenges of wealth, betrayal, and ambition. The plot intricately weaves themes of greed, power, and mystery as Madame Midas encounters various characters drawn to her fortune, leading to unexpected twists and turns.
Read More
Format: Paperback / softback
$1799
AVAILABLE WITH SUPPLIER Ships from our Auckland warehouse within 4-6 weeks

Found a better price? Request a price match

Book Hero Magic created this recommendation. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! IS THIS YOUR NEXT READ?

You might enjoy this book if you are fascinated by tales of wealth, mystery, and intrigue set in the colourful backdrop of 19th century Australia. The story weaves a rich tapestry of suspense and drama, following the adventures and challenges of a strong female lead as she navigates through the complexities of fortune and betrayal.

Book Hero thinking about your next read

Book Hero Magic formatted this description to make it easier to read. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Description

Charming, intelligent and forthright, the remarkable Madame Midas makes her fortune on the goldfields of Ballarat—and becomes the target of the villainous ex-convict Gaston Vandeloup, a charismatic Frenchman who soon makes himself indispensable to her mining operations.

A companion piece to The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, Fergus Hume's second novel is both a tightly plotted murder mystery and an insight into the heady days of the Golden City and Marvellous Melbourne.

Series: Text Classics

View all
  • A Fence Around the Cuckoo
    This first volume of Ruth Park’s autobiography is an account of her isolated childhood in the rainforests of New Zealand, her convent education which encouraged her love of words and writing, and the bitter years of the Depression. She then entered the rough-and-tumble world of journalism and began a reluctant correspondence with a young Australian writer. In 1942, Park moved...
    Paperback
    $1700
    Elsewhere:
    $1799
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • Time without Clocks
    Neither the kitchen clock nor the figured squares of the calendar could measure our first golden summers at Mulberry Hill. They were the timeless clockless summers of a dream. Joan Lindsay’s charming and evocative autobiography tells the story of her marriage to Sir Daryl Lindsay, of their life in Melbourne in the 1920s and ’30s, of their travels, and above...
    Paperback
    $1700
    Elsewhere:
    $1799
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • An Iron Rose
    The pain seemed to dissolve. Cold and rough tarmac against the face, chill wind down here at ground level, smell of French perfume on my shirt, delicious. I registered that but all I felt was sad. This is a stupid way to go, I thought. Careless. When Mac Faraday's best friend is found hanging, the assumption is suicide. But Mac...
    Paperback
    $1799
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • Dark Places
    This is Albion Gidley Singer at the pen, a man with a weakness for a good fact. The first fact is always the hardest: you have to begin somewhere, and such is the nature of this intractable universe that the only thing you can start with is yourself. Dark Places, a companion novel to Lilian's Story, is the tale of...
    Paperback
    $1799
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • Lilian's Story
    Listen, I told myself, and heard the waves against the harbour-wall, a gull being peevish, the white tapping stick of a blind man against the stones. Listen, I told myself, this is history. Loosely inspired by the legendary Sydney bohemian Bea Miles, Kate Grenville’s much-loved debut novel recounts the life of the irrepressible Lilian Una Singer: from wealthy middle-class girlhood...
    Paperback
    $1799
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • Me and Mr Booker
    I know what Mr Booker would say on the topic of experience. He would say what you lose on the swings you gain on the roundabouts. Martha could have said no when Mr Booker tried to kiss her. But Martha is sixteen, she lives in a dull town, her father is mad, her home is stifling. Of course she would...
    Paperback
    $1799
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • A Little Tea, a Little Chat
    'Ever since his early manhood, since his marriage, he had bought women; most had been bargains and most had made delivery at once. He never paid in advance— "I got no time for futures in women".' New York, on the cusp of World War II. Robert Grant, a middle-aged businessman, lives life by his own rules. His chief hobbies are...
    Paperback
    $1799
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • A Pure Clear Light
    Simon and Flora Beaufort have three perfect children and a comfortable, happy life in London. When Flora takes the children for a month-long vacation in France, Simon stays home to work on his latest film project... what could go wrong? A Pure Clear Light examines a marriage at the moment it goes haplessly off-track: Simon succumbs to the temptation of...
    Paperback
    $1799
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • Blue Skies
    In Helen Hodgman's dazzlingly written debut, a young woman is trapped in a small city on an island at the end of the world—by motherhood and an absent husband, by busybody in-laws and neighbours, by a drab society yet to throw off the shackles of its colonial past. A darkly funny tale of a crack-up in stultifying suburbia, Blue Skies...
    Paperback
    $1799
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • Homesickness
    It could almost have been their own country: these sections with the gums briefly framed like a traditional oil painting by the slowly passing window. The colours were as brown and parched; that chaff-coloured grass, Ah, this dun-coloured realism. Any minute now the cry of the crow or a cockatoo; but no. Thirteen men and women travel the world on...
    Paperback
    $1799
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • In the Memorial Room
    In the Memorial Room is a brilliant black comedy by the celebrated author of An Angel at My Table. Harry Gill, a moderately successful writer of historical fiction, has been awarded the annual Watercress-Armstrong Fellowship—a 'living memorial' to the poet Margaret Rose Hurndell. He arrives in the French Riviera town of Menton, where Hurndell once lived and worked, to write....
    Paperback
    $1799
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • Madame Midas
    Charming, intelligent and forthright, the remarkable Madame Midas makes her fortune on the goldfields of Ballarat—and becomes the target of the villainous ex-convict Gaston Vandeloup, a charismatic Frenchman who soon makes himself indispensable to her mining operations. A companion piece to The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, Fergus Hume's second novel is both a tightly plotted murder mystery and an...
    Paperback
    $1799
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks

Book Hero Magic summarised reviews for this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! HOW HAS THIS BEEN REVIEWED?

Madame Midas by Fergus Hume is praised for its captivating characters, including the standout character of Madame Midas, a compelling Victorian heroine. The novel is noted for transporting readers into a vivid past, presenting a rich view of early Melbourne full of intrigue. It is both an entertaining and enlightening read, credited with being historically significant while remaining highly accessible and enjoyable.

Book Hero reading reviews

Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9781925498400

Publisher: Text Publishing

Format: Paperback / softback

Date Published: 30 January 2017

Country: Australia

Imprint: The Text Publishing Company

Contributors:

  • Introduction by Clare Wright

Audience: General / adult

DIMENSIONS

Width: 128.0mm

Height: 198.0mm

Weight: 250g

Pages: 368

About the Author

Fergus Hume was born in England in 1859. His family soon immigrated to New Zealand, where Hume qualified as a lawyer. He was admitted to the bar in 1885 and moved to Melbourne in the same year. Desperate to become a playwright but having no success, Hume decided to write a murder novel instead. When he couldn't find a publisher for The Mystery of a Hansom Cab he published it himself. It was a sensation and sold over twenty thousand copies in Melbourne. With a hit on his hands, Hume sold his copyright to the Hansom Cab Publishing Company in London for fifty pounds. The book was a phenomenal success but Hume never saw another penny from his bestseller. It may have influenced Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet, the first Sherlock Holmes adventure. Hume moved back to England in 1888 after the publication of his second novel, Madame Midas. He embarked on a career that produced over 130 novels. He never became a famous playwright but he did co-write the theatrical adaptation of The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, which played in London for five hundred nights. The story was also filmed three times in the silent era. Fergus Hume died in 1932.

Also by Fergus Hume

View all
  • The Mystery of a Hansom Cab
    The Mystery of a Hansom Cab by Fergus Hume is Australia's original blockbuster and an international best-selling crime novel. First published in 1886, it achieved overnight sensation status by selling hundreds of thousands of copies worldwide and being translated into eleven languages. Over a century later, Hansom Cab has lost none of its page-turning power. Set in the charming yet...
    Paperback
    $1799
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • The Mystery of a Hansom Cab
    The Mystery of a Hansom Cab was the best-selling crime novel of the nineteenth century. It was an overnight sensation when published in Melbourne in 1886 and rapidly found readers around the world, especially in Britain. The book became a huge international success and was translated into eleven languages. The novel's fame has endured well into this century. In 1954,...
    Paperback
    $2700
    Elsewhere:
    $2900
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks

More from General Fiction

View all
  • The Wedding People
    'BEST READ OF THE YEAR SO FAR' THE TIMES 'BOOKS AS FUN AS THIS ONE ARE FEW AND FAR BETWEEN' GUARDIAN Phoebe Stone arrives at a grand beachside hotel in Rhode Island wearing her best dress and least comfortable shoes. Immediately she is mistaken for one of the wedding people — but she's actually the only guest at the Cornwall...
    Paperback
    $2399
    Elsewhere:
    $2799
    (3)
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • Theo of Golden
    THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLING PHENOMENON'For anything to be truly good, there must be love in it. Nothing is what it's supposed to be if love is not at the core.' One morning, a stranger arrives in the town of Golden. No one knows who he is or where he came from…His name is Theo and he's arrived there by chance –...
    Paperback
    $2899
    Elsewhere:
    $3499
    (5)
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • New Release
    On Mystic Lake
    One of the greatest storytellers of our time - Delia Owens, author of Where the Crawdads Sing Annie Colwater's only child has just left home for school in England. On that same day, her husband of twenty years confesses that he's in love with a younger woman. Left alone in the beautiful California house which was once a home, Annie...
    Paperback
    $3100
    Elsewhere:
    $3800
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • New Release
    Land
    Inspired by the mapping of Ireland in the mid nineteenth century, Land, the new novel from the author of Hamnet, is at once intimate and epic: a portrait of a family navigating a legacy of upheaval and loss with love and hope. On a windswept peninsula stretching out into the Atlantic, Tomás and his reluctant son, Liam, are working for the great...
    Paperback
    $3199
    Elsewhere:
    $3799
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • Signed Bookplate
    New Release
    Light Wielder
    THE EPIC CONCLUSION TO METAL SLINGER, AKA THE BOOK WITH THE PLOT TWIST THAT BROKE THE INTERNET Sail the seas. Master the blade. Protect your heart. What would you do to have it all? READERS ARE GOING WILD FOR *METAL SLINGER* ‘The BEST plot twist to ever grace my Kindle’ ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ‘The author is a mastermind. Romantasy is back!!!!’ ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐...
    Paperback
    $3199
    Elsewhere:
    $3799
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • Mistborn Trilogy Boxed Set
    The Mistborn Trilogy Boxed Set by Brandon Sanderson is a landmark fantasy series that has captivated readers worldwide. Renowned for its innovative magic system, intricate world-building, and compelling characters, this trilogy is a must-have for any fantasy enthusiast. Immerse yourself in a world shrouded in ash, where a once-hopeful land is ruled by the tyrannical Dark Lord, known as the...
    Set
    $6499
    Elsewhere:
    $7500
    (2)
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • Project Hail Mary
    THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLING NOVEL A BARACK OBAMA READING PICK A lone astronaut. An impossible mission. An ally he never imagined. 'The most enjoyable hard SF I have read in years' GUARDIAN 'Weir's finest work to date... This is the one book I read last year that I am certain I can recommend to anyone, no matter who, and know...
    Paperback
    $2099
    Elsewhere:
    $2800
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • Project Hail Mary
    Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, the SUNDAY TIMES and NEW YORK TIMES bestselling author of The Martian, offers a gripping new adventure in hard science fiction. With endorsement from notable figures such as Barack Obama and a slew of five-star reviews, this novel promises a thrilling and intellectually stimulating journey. Ryland Grace, a lone astronaut, finds himself on a...
    Paperback
    $2399
    Elsewhere:
    $2400
    (4)
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • The Deal
    Welcome to Briar U! Get ready for your newest obsession . . . Discover the addictive world of the Off-Campus series from The Queen of Hockey Romance, Elle Kennedy! Read The Deal now for the perfect fake-dating romance! She's about to make a deal with the college bad boy . . . Hannah Wells has finally found someone who turns...
    Paperback
    $2499
    Elsewhere:
    $2799
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • New Release
    The Bookshop Detectives 3: Murder and Mojitos
    Art Deco glamour, a Cuban crime queen and a grammar-obsessed killer collide in the #1 best-selling Bookshop Detectives’ high-stakes final instalment. The Bookshop Detectives are on the case! Booksellers Garth and Eloise Sherlock (and their cowardly dog, Stevie) have been roped into hosting Murder and Mojitos, a glamorous Art Deco festival event starring Cuba’s queen of crime fiction. Between flapper...
    Paperback
    $3000
    Elsewhere:
    $3800
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • On Sale
    20% off
    The Wrath of the Fallen
    SAMKIEL AND DIANNA WILL RETURN in the next sizzling, dark romantasy series from Amber V. Nicole. EPIC. SPICY. ADDICTIVE. Embrace the darkness . . . 'If you like romantasy, read this!' RAVEN KENNEDY 'A wicked ride from beginning to heart-shattering end. Leaving me literally screaming for more' HANNAH NICOLE MAERHER 'This is perfection. Amber Nicole's Dianna is the FMC of...
    Paperback
    $2400
    Elsewhere:
    $3799
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • New Release
    Yesteryear
    A BOLD AND BITING SATIRE. WILL HAVE YOU GASPING TO THE FINAL PAGE — Nita Prose WICKEDLY FUNNY, BEAUTIFULLY WRITTEN AND FRIGHTENINGLY PERCEPTIVE — Abigail Dean INVENTIVE, ADDICTIVE, A WILD RIDE — Ashley Audrain SHOT THROUGH WITH HUMOUR AND LACED WITH DARKNESS — Clare Mackintosh The Stepford Wives meets The Handmaid's Tale — Hannah Deitch My name was Natalie Heller...
    Paperback
    $2999
    Elsewhere:
    $3699
    (2)
    In Stock
    Ships today

Why buy from us?

Book Hero is not a chain store or big box retailer. We're an independent 100% NZ-owned business on a mission to help more Kiwis rediscover a love of books and reading!

Service & Delivery

Service & Delivery

Our warehouse in Auckland holds over 100,000 books, toys, board games and puzzles in-stock so you're not waiting for your order to arrive from overseas.

Auckland Bookstore

Auckland Bookstore

We're primarily an online store, but for your convenience you can pick up your order for free from our bookstore, which is right next door to our warehouse in Hobsonville.

Our Gifting Service

Our Gifting Service

Books make wonderful thoughtful gifts and we're here to help with gift-wrapping and cards. We can even send your gift directly to your loved one.