The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (Everyman's Library CLASSICS) - Hardcover

Conrad, Joseph

3.59

22,810 ratings by Goodreads

9781857151237: The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (Everyman's Library CLASSICS)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1857151232 ISBN 13: 9781857151237

Publisher: Everyman, 1992

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This is the only novel that Conrad set in London, and it communicates a profoundly ironic view of human affairs. The story is woven around an attack on the Greenwich Observatory in 1894. Verloc, (a Russian spy who is also working for the police) is ostensibly a member of an anarchist group in Soho.

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Review:

"Perenially fascinating... When Joseph Conrad wrote The Secret Agent he was responding imaginatively to a real botched bomb attack on Greenwich, at a time when there was real panic about anarchist extremism throughout Europe" (Guardian)

"An astonishing book" (Ford Madox Ford)

"This damp, dark thriller dances about on satirical feet, from its opening paragraph to the very last, where it suddenly plunges like Chernobyl's core to our own apocalyptic times, seamed with petit-bourgeois envy and crazed fundamentalist dreams. Whether attacking the former or the latter, Conrad never lets go of his grim, twitchy smile." (Adam Thorpe Guardian)

"One of the two unquestionable classics of the first order that [Conrad] added to the English novel" (F.R. Leavis)

Book Description:

'Spookily topical' - Guardian

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