Joseph Conrad Series

Set in a jungle village in eastern Borneo during the 1880s, Almayer's Folly recreates the many conflicts - economic, religious, racial, cultural, sexual - of imperial Europe with the colonized East Indies through Joseph Conrad's story of Kaspar Almayer's personal tragedy: his loss of both his daughter of mixed race to her native lover and his dream of finding enough gold to return to Amsterdam in triumph. The introduction gives the history of the composition of Conrad's first book, which was started in London in the autumn of 1889 and completed four and a half years later; the manuscript went with him to the Congo, Australia, the Ukraine, Belgium, Switzerland and France on his travels as a seaman and on holiday. During this long gestation, some of the chapters were typed twice, and later Conrad's slightly foreign English was tidied several times by publishers. The novel has suffered seven layers of unauthorized intervention, as set out in the essay on the text and the apparatus. The notes explain Malay terms and historical references, and there are two regional maps. This is the text of Almayer's Folly, established through modern textual scholarship, as Conrad would have liked it to have appeared in 1895.

Lord Jim

by Joseph Conrad

Published 1 January 1899

Lord Jim (1900): Jim is one of Conrad's most complex creations, and Conrad explores, along the vast horizon of this gorgeous novel, the phenomena of shame, guilt, retribution -- and redemption. How right it is for our times!

Originally published in 1904, Nostromo is considered by many to be Conrad's supreme achievement. Set in the imaginary South American republic of Costaguana, the novel reveals the effects of unbridled greed and imperialist interests on many different lives. V.S. Pritchett wrote, "Nostromo is the most strikingly modern of Conrad's novels. It is pervaded by a profound, even morbid sense of insecurity which is the very spirit of our age."

The Secret Agent

by Joseph Conrad

Published 1 June 1907

This is the only novel that Conrad set in London, and it communicates a profoundly ironic view of human affairs. The story is woven around an attack on the Greenwich Observatory in 1894. Verlac, (a Russian spy who is also working for the police) is ostensibly a member of an anarchist group in Soho. His masters instruct him to discredit the anarchists in some spectacular way. The upshot of the affair is that his evil plan goes horribly wrong and the repercussions are dramatically different from those that Verloc intended.