The Secret Agent

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. Extraordinarily 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."|