The Secret Agent (1907) by:Joseph Conrad - Softcover

Joseph, Conrad

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1530432251 ISBN 13: 9781530432257

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2016

Synopsis

Mr Verloc, the secret agent, keeps a shop in London's Soho where he lives with his wife Winnie, her infirm mother, and her idiot brother, Stevie. When Verloc is reluctantly involved in an anarchist plot to blow up the Greenwich Observatory things go disastrously wrong, and what appears to be "a simple tale" proves to involve politicians, policemen, foreign diplomats and London's fashionable society in the darkest and most surprising interrelations. Based on the text which Conrad's first English readers enjoyed, this new edition includes a full and up-to-date bibliography, a comprehensive chronology and a critical introduction which describes Conrad's great London novel as the realization of a "monstrous town," a place of idiocy, madness, criminality, and butchery. It also discusses contemporary anarchist activity in the UK, imperialism, and Conrad's narrative techniques.

About this title

Review:

"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

Book Description:

'Spookily topical' - Guardian

About this edition

• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1530432251
• ISBN 13: 9781530432257
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 160