The Secret Agent »

Most readers know Joseph Conrad for creating Marlow's harrowing journey through the African Congo in Heart of Darkness. Conrad was adept at capturing the physical and cultural experiences he gleaned from 15 years at sea, but he also wrote political thrillers, essays, and plays based on his own short stories. His best works tend to be brief, but pack in a remarkable perspicacity about humanity's deepest faults.

The Secret Agent is the unsurpassed ancestor of a long series of twentieth-century novels and films which explore the confused motives that lie
at the heart of political terrorism. In its use of powerful psychological insight to intensify narrative suspense, it set the terms by which subsequent
works in its genre were created.