The Heart Of Darkness( Series - Everyman's Library (paper) )

Charles Marlow's journey into the heart of Africa is an odyssey into corruption, absurdity and folly. He sees rapacious Europeans exploiting the Africans and conspiring against each other; he voyages upstream on a paddle-steamer that comes under lethal attack; and he encounters the great idealist, Mr Kurtz, the genius who seemed to represent the best of Europe. But Mr Kurtz has 'taken a high seat among the devils of the land', and Marlow returns to Europe bearing the burden of appalling knowledge, forced to make his 'choice of nightmares'.

This is Conrad's most subtle, compressed and proleptic work. Acclaimed as a supreme literary achievement, it has also come under literary, historical, and political attack. The profoundly influential novel journeys toward the settlement of the demonic Mr. Kurtz, the genius who would represent the best of Europe-but who, turned by the colonial experience to abuses both psychological and social, horrifies his investigator Marlow and commits him to witness the repulsive profundity of his own soul and times.