The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale( Series - Everyman's Library (cloth) )

At first, Joseph Conrad did not dare to call this book a novel. He traveled to Montpellier in February 1906 with his small family, telling himself that he was composing a short story, entitled 'Verloc', the name of the central character. As always, he wrote slowly, in a stubborn mood of exasperation an uncertainty, laboring in a foreign language.

(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed)
The Secret Agent is the unsurpassed ancestor of a long series of twentieth-century novels and films which explore the confused motives that lie at the heart of political terrorism. In its use of powerful psychological insight to intensify narrative suspense, it set the terms by which subsequent works in its genre were created. Conrad was the first novelist to discover the strange in-between territory of the political exile, and his genius was such that we still have no truer map of that region's moral terrain than his story of a terrorist plot and its tragic consequences for the guilty and innocent alike.
Introduction by Paul Theroux