An unabridged, unaltered edition of The Secret Sharer, to include the classic story, Youth: A Narrative, at book's end.

Heart of Darkness follows one man's nightmarish journey into the interior of Africa-but don't worry. No one's going to get eaten by a lion. It all takes place in the past, because what we have here is a frame story. Aboard a British ship called the Nellie, three men listen to a dude named Marlow recount his journey into Africa as an agent for the Company, a Belgian ivory trading firm. (Mercifully, he doesn't force them to look through 1000 of his trip photos on Facebook.) Along the way, he witnesses brutality and hate between colonizers and the native African people, becomes entangled in a...

Jim (his surname is never disclosed), a young British seaman, becomes first mate on the Patna, a ship full of pilgrims travelling to Mecca for the hajj. When the ship starts rapidly taking on water and disaster seems imminent, Jim joins his captain and other crew members in abandoning the ship and its passengers. A few days later, they are picked up by a British ship. However, the Patna and its passengers are later also saved, and the reprehensible actions of the crew are exposed. The other participants evade the judicial court of inquiry, leaving Jim to the court alone. The court strips him...

The novel is set in London in 1886 and follows the life of Mr. Verloc, a secret agent. Verloc is also a businessman who owns a shop which sells pornographic material, contraceptives, and bric-a-brac. He lives with his wife Winnie, his mother-in-law, and his brother-in-law, Stevie. Stevie has a mental disability, possibly autism, 5] which causes him to be very excitable; his sister, Verloc's wife, attends to him, treating him more as a son than as a brother. Verloc's friends are a group of anarchists of which Comrade Ossipon, Michaelis, and "The Professor" are the most prominent. Although...

The work, written in 1896 and partly based on Conrad's experiences of a voyage from Bombay to London, began as a short story but developed into a novella of some 53,000 words. As it grew, Conrad began to think of its being serialized. After Smith Elder had rejected it for the Cornhill Magazine, William Ernest Henley accepted it for the New Review, and Conrad wrote to his agent, Garnett, "Now I have conquered Henley, I ain't 'fraid o' the divvle himself " Some years later, in 1904, Conrad described this acceptance as "the first event in my writing life which really counted." In the United...

The story takes place in Africa during the time it was colonized by Europeans. The actual date of the events is not included, but one can surmise from the date of publication that it is sometime in the late 1800's. Carlier and Kayerts, two white men, are dropped off at the trading post by a steamboat. They live in a house, built of reeds with a verandah on all sides, which sits in a clearing in the jungle. A native man named Makola lives with his wife and three children, in a hut nearby. Beyond the houses is the grave of a painter who ran the trading post before he died of a fever. Over this...

Under Western Eyes (1911) is a novel by Joseph Conrad. The novel takes place in St. Petersburg, Russia, and Geneva, Switzerland, and is viewed as Conrad's response to the themes explored in Crime and Punishment; Conrad was reputed to have detested Dostoevsky. It is also, some say, Conrad's response to his own early life; his father was a famous revolutionary imprisoned by the Russians, but, instead of following in his father's footsteps, at the age of sixteen Conrad left his native land forever. 1]:89 2] Indeed, while writing Under Western Eyes, Conrad suffered a weeks-long breakdown during...

Typhoon is a classic sea yarn, possibly based upon Conrad's actual experience of seaman's life, and probably on a real incident aboard of the real steamer John P. Best. It describes how Captain MacWhirr sails the Siamese steamer Nan-Shan into a typhoon-a mature tropical cyclone of the northwestern part of the Pacific Ocean. Other characters include the young Jukes - most probably an "alter ego" of Conrad from the time he had sailed under captain John McWhir - and Solomon Rout, the chief engineer. The novel classically evokes the seafaring life at the turn of the century. While Macwhirr, who,...

"The Secret Sharer" begins with the anonymous narrator - the recently appointed captain of an unnamed ship - anchored in the Gulf of Siam (what is now called the Gulf of Thailand). As the Captain stands on the deck, alone, he soaks in the sunset and silence of the sea. He feels like a stranger to his new command, the ship, and his crew. At supper that night, the Captain remarks that he saw the masts of a ship that must be anchored inside a nearby group of islands. The Second Mate tells him that the ship is the Sephora, from Liverpool, carrying a cargo of coal. As a goodwill gesture toward the...

A Smile of Fortune is one of Joseph Conrad's lesser-known long stories. He was essentially a nineteenth century writer who anticipated and then lived into the modernist age of the early twentieth century, helping to shape its spirit of uncertainty, anxiety, and moral ambiguity. Even his own life and works share the contradictions of the era. He is best known as an author of mannish sea tales, yet he only achieved success with a novel set largely on dry land which had a woman as its central character (Flora Barral in Chance). A Smile of FortuneHe is now regarded as a great figure in the...