Lord Jim

Lord Jim is Joseph Conrad's classic novel of guilt, honour, moral failure, and the lifelong search for redemption. Jim, a young British seaman, dreams of courage and heroic action, but when crisis comes aboard the distressed passenger ship Patna, he abandons ship with the rest of the crew and must face disgrace, public judgment, and his own divided conscience. Stripped of his certificate and haunted by shame, he moves from port to port until he finds a second life in the remote settlement of Patusan, where he becomes a respected leader known as Lord Jim.

Conrad turns a sea-adventure premise into one of the great psychological and moral novels of modern English literature. Through the narrative voice of Marlow, Lord Jim examines courage, cowardice, illusion, colonial power, reputation, storytelling, and the unstable distance between the person one hopes to be and the person revealed under pressure. For readers of classic fiction, literary fiction, sea stories, adventure novels, psychological fiction, and early twentieth-century modernism, Lord Jim remains one of Conrad's central achievements.