The Secret Agent

Description

'The terrorist and the policeman both come from the same basket.' Set in an Edwardian London underworld of terrorist bombers, spies, grotesques and fanatics, Conrad's dark, unsettling masterpiece asks if we ever really know others, or ourselves. A new series of twenty distinctive, unforgettable Penguin Classics in a beautiful new design and pocket-sized format, with coloured jackets echoing Penguin's original covers.

Joseph Conrad's major works (all published by Penguin Classics) include Heart of Darkness, Nostromo, Lord Jim,Under Western Eyes, The Secret Agent and Typhoon.

"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