The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale

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Description

The Secret Agent is the unsurpassed ancestor of a long series of twentieth-century novels and

Reviews

The Secret Agent is an astonishing book. It is one of the bestand certainly the most significantdetective 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 Conrads supreme masterpieces. F. R. Leavis

[The Secret Agent] was in effect the worlds first political thrillerspies, conspirators, wily policemen, murders, bombings . . . Conrad was also giving artistic expression to his domestic anxietieshis 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

Author Bio

Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) grew up amid political unrest in Russian-occupied Poland. After twenty years at sea with the French and British merchant navies, he settled in England in 1894. Over the next three decades he revolutionized the English novel with works such as Typhoon (1902), Youth (1902), Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907), Under Western Eyes (1911), Chance (1913), and Victory (1915).