Joseph Conrad

"Set in early twentieth-century London and inspired by an actual attempt to blow up the Greenwich Observatory, The Secret Agent is a complex exploration of motivation and morality. The title character, Adolf Verloc, is obviously no James Bond. In fact, he and his circle of misfit saboteurs are not spies but terrorists, driven less by political ideals than by their unruly emotions and irrational hatreds. Verloc has settled into an apparent marriage...

Baron Axel Heyst and his lover, Lena, a woman he has saved from a sordid life, share an idyllic existence on the island of Samburan until three intruders from Lena's past threaten to destroy their happiness.

Acclaimed as one of Conrad's finest literary achievements, this gripping novel deftly depicts the political turmoil of nineteenth-century Russia and follows the dramatic developments in the life of a student, Razumov, as he prepares for a career in the czarist bureaucracy. In a plot that twists and turns, Razumov unwittingly becomes embroiled in a revolutionary conspiracy when he gives refuge to a fellow student who assassinated a public official....

Chance (1914) was the first of Conrad's novels to bring him popular success and it holds a unique place among his works. It tells the story of Flora de Barral, a vulnerable and abandoned young girl who is "like a beggar, without a right to anything but compassion." After her bankrupt father is imprisoned, she learns the harsh fact that a woman in her position "has no resources but in herself." Her only means of action is to be what she is. Flora's...

A young sea captain's first command brings with it a succession of crises: his sea is becalmed, the crew laid low by fever, and his deranged first mate is convinced that the ship is haunted by the malignant spirit of a previous captain.

Henry Whalley is a true sailor, earning years of experience as a ship's captain before his retirement. Faced with unexpected financial problems and a desire to help his married daughter earn her place in the world, Whalley is forced to sell his boat and buy his way back into service on a trade vessel. But Whalley is living so close to financial ruin that any small deviation from his course will put him over the edge . . . The End of the Tether is...

Regarded by critics and fans alike as one of the masters of English fiction, Joseph Conrad is known for novels and works of fiction such as The Heart of Darkness, Victory, and Lord Jim. The collection A Set of Six brings together a number of Conrad's shorter pieces, featuring a swashbuckling cast of characters that will appeal to fans of the action-adventure genre. As part of our mission to publish great works of literary fiction and nonfiction, Sheba...

When Willems stepped off the straight and narrow path of his own peculiar honesty he thought it would be a short episode - a sentence in brackets, so to speak - in the flowing tale of his life. But Willems was wrong, for he was about to embark on a voyage of discovery and self-discovery that would change, if not destroy, the reset of his life. Marooned by his own people on the shore of a Malayan island, Willems is caught in the grip of his own vulnerability...

During the Carlist war of the early 1870s, a young sailor joins the champions of Don Carlos de Bourbon, pretender to the throne of Spain. The Carlists use the eager youth's intense attraction to the sea to persuade him to run perilous enterprises for their cause, ventures he later learns have been financed by the beautiful mistress and heiress of a rich man's fortune. When he falls in love with her, he finds himself moved absolutely by this discovery,...

We meet adventurer Tom Lingard aboard his brig Lightning. His ship is stuck with no wind on their way to ... somewhere. There may be pirates in the waters around them, but it is not a pirate who arrives beside them in a small boat. A yacht has grounded on a sandbank and the men in the boat have been sent out with urgent messages for help. But Lingard is dismayed to learn the exact location of the stranded yacht, for it turns out to be the very spot...