The secret agent
By: Joseph Conrad.
Edition: Modern Library pbk. ed.
Publisher: Modern Library
Published: 1998
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 257
Subjects: Conspiracies -- Fiction; Anarchists -- Fiction; Bombings -- Fiction; London (England) -- Fiction
Genres: Fiction.
Description: 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 Carre. 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."