Product Description

The Secret Agent is an astonishing book," said Ford Madox Ford. "It is one of the best--and certainly the most significant--
detective stories ever written."
        Set in late-nineteenth-century London, Joseph Conrad's intense political thriller anticipates the espionage novels of such writers as Graham Greene and John le Carré. It concerns a double agent who is charged with provoking the radical group he has infiltrated into an act of sabotage that will bring about its own destruction. In a marvelously drawn underworld of political and criminal intrigue, Conrad brilliantly explores the confused motives that lie at the heart of terrorism. Extraor-dinarily modern in the ironic view it takes of human affairs, this masterly tale of conspiracy builds to a climax that the critic F. R. Leavis called "one of the most astonishing triumphs of genius in fiction."
        "The Secret Agent is an altogether thrilling 'crime story' . . . a
political novel of a foreign embassy intrigue and its tragic human out-come," said Thomas Mann. And F. R. Leavis deemed it "one of Conrad's supreme masterpieces . . . one of the unquestioned classics of the first order that he added to the English novel."

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1051070 in Books
• Published on: 1998-09-14
• Released on: 1998-09-14
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 7.90" h x .70" w x 5.20" l, .50 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

From AudioFile
Thoroughly ironic and even sarcastic, this early, atypical Conrad novel is an ultimately tragic, comedy of errors spy story, which challenges the oral interpreter to set the right tone. Lean too heavily on the Dickensian caricatures and the tale seems a tastelessly cruel joke. Go too far the other way and you miss the point, as well as the humor. Geoffrey Howard gallops through the narrative without trying though he fittingly gets caught up in the excellent prose. However, the recording still misses something essential in the book's personality. Y.R. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Ingram
One one of the great detective novels of all time, "The Secret Conrad", written in 1903, is a magisterial thriller of terrorists and police in London in the early years of the 20th century.

From the Publisher
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