Joseph Conrad

Although Polish, Joseph Conrad is one of the greatest English writers, and Heart of Darkness is considered his best. As a reader we are brought to face our psychological selves to answer, ‘Who is the true savage?’

The novel details the undoing of Peter Willems, a disreputable, immoral man who, on the run from a scandal in Makassar, finds refuge in a hidden native village, only to betray his benefactors over lust for the tribal chief's daughter. The story features Conrad's recurring character Tom Lingard, who also appears in Almayer's Folly (1895) and The Rescue (1920), in addition to sharing other characters with those novels. It is considered to be underrated...

Under Western Eyes 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 considered to be one of Conrad's major works and is close in subject matter to The Secret Agent.

Inspired by an actual attempt to blow up the Greenwich Observatory, The Secret Agent portrays the world of late-nineteenth-century London, with its fatuous civil servants, corrupt police, and squalid underworld characters like Verloc, a pornographer acting as a government informant. Verloc’s assignment is to provoke the radicals whose group he has penetrated into committing an act of such violence that they will be discredited and their appeal to...

A United States Army officer/trained assassin is sent into the depths of a southeast Asian jungle to seek out a renegade colonel and terminate his command during the Vietnam War.