The Secret Agent

By: Joseph Conrad

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Paperback | 6 August 2015 | Edition Number 1

At a Glance

Paperback
288 Pages

Age
18+

Dimensions(cm)
16.7 x 10.4 x 2.0

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The classic tale known as the first spy novel, now with a new afterword.

This chillingly prophetic examination of terrorism by the author of Heart of Darknessis the literary precursor to the espionage thrillers of Graham Greene and John Le Carre.

Inspired by an actual attempt to blow up the Greenwich Observatory,The Secret Agent portrays the world of late-nineteenth-century London, with its fatuous civil servants, corrupt police, and squalid underworld characters like Verloc, a pornographer acting as a government informant. Verloc's assignment is to provoke the radicals whose group he has penetrated into committing an act of such violence that they will be discredited and their appeal to the masses destroyed. With its questionable characters and amoral caricatures, the novel is as much a black satire of English society as a frightening mirror of the present day.

With an Introduction by E. L. Doctorowand a New Afterword by Debra Romanick Baldwin

Industry Reviews

"The Secret Agent is an astonishing book. It is one of the best--and certainly the most significant--detective stories ever written." --Ford Madox Ford

"The Secret Agent is an altogether thrilling 'crime story' . . . a political novel of a foreign embassy intrigue and its tragic human outcome." --Thomas Mann

"One of Conrad's supreme masterpieces." --F. R. Leavis

"[The Secret Agent] was in effect the world's first political thriller--spies, conspirators, wily policemen, murders, bombings . . . Conrad was also giving artistic expression to his domestic anxieties--his overweight wife and problem child, his lack of money, his inactivity, his discomfort in London, his uneasiness in English society, his sense of exile, of being an alien . . . The novel has the perverse logic and derangement of a dream."
--from the Introduction to the Everyman's Library edition by Paul Theroux

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