Books with title The Secret Agent : A Simple Tale

“I am afraid that if you want to go down into history you'll have to do something for it.” ― Joseph Conrad, The Secret AgentJoseph Conrad invented the terrorist-spy genre in 1907 with his novella The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale.. The Secret Agent was one of "the three works of literature most cited in the American media" around the two weeks following September 11, 2001.” ( From “Conrad in the Twentieth Century: Contemporary Approaches and Perspectives, Abingdon, Oxford.”). The story is set in London in 1886 and deals largely with the life of Mr. Verloc and his job as a spy. The Secret Agent is notable as one of Conrad's later political novels, which move away from his typical tales of seafaring. The novel deals broadly with the notions of anarchism, espionage, and terrorism and depicts the type of anarchist and revolutionary groups which sprouted up before many of the social uprisings of the early twentieth century. Recently, The Secret Agent was ranked the 46th best novel of the 20th century by Modern Library. “One of Conrad's supreme masterpieces. . . .one of the unquestioned classics of the first order that he added to the English novel.” - F. R. Leavis*Includes image gallery.*Includes link to free unabridged audio recording of The Secret Agent.

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics.‘They swarmed numerous like locusts, industrious like ants, thoughtless like a natural force, pushing on blind and orderly and absorbed, impervious to sentiment, to logic – to terror, too, perhaps.’Considered one of Conrad’s most political works, The Secret Agent is set against the dismal backdrop of a drab and alienating London, and tells the story of the bombing of Greenwich Observatory by a group of anarchists.Shopkeeper, spy and reluctant anarchist Mr Verloc becomes embroiled in this terrorist plot, exploiting his mentally disabled brother-in-law Stevie in the process, leading to tragic circumstances.

Mr Verloc, the secret agent, keeps a shop in London's Soho where he lives with his wife Winnie, her infirm mother, and her idiot brother, Stevie. When Verloc is reluctantly involved in an anarchist plot to blow up the Greenwich Observatory things go disastrously wrong, and what appears to be 'a simple tale' proves to involve politicians, policemen, foreign diplomats and London's fashionable society in the darkest and most surprising interrelations.