The Secret Agent, 9780141441580
Paperback
A spy, anarchists, and a plot gone terribly wrong in London.

The Secret Agent

a simple tale

$22.89

  • Paperback

    320 pages

  • Release Date

    23 September 2007

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Summary

The Secret Agent: An Ironic Tale of Espionage in London

In the only novel Conrad set in London, The Secret Agent communicates a profoundly ironic view of human affairs. The story is woven around an attack on the Greenwich Observatory in 1894 masterminded by Verloc, a Russian spy working for the police, and ostensibly a member of an anarchist group in Soho. His masters instruct him to discredit the anarchists in a humiliating fashion, and when his evil plan goes horribly awr…

Book Details

ISBN-13:9780141441580
ISBN-10:0141441585
Series:Penguin Classics
Author:Joseph Conrad, Michael Newton
Publisher:Penguin Books Ltd
Imprint:Penguin Classics
Format:Paperback
Number of Pages:320
Release Date:23 September 2007
Weight:237g
Dimensions:197mm x 129mm x 18mm
What They're Saying

Critics 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

About The Author

Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad’s major works (all published by Penguin Classics) include Heart of Darkness, Nostromo, Lord Jim, Under Western Eyes, The Secret Agent and Typhoon.

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