In the Library
The Secret Agent
Joseph Conrad, 1907
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 6.5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 13
- Length
- Length 90k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
Mr Verloc, going out in the morning, left his shop nominally in charge of his brother-in-law.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dostoevsky's young man kills for an idea and is undone by his own conscience, the Russian shadow Conrad was writing against when he turned to bombers and spies.
Free in the app
Demons
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dostoevsky does the same thing with a small provincial town, but lets the revolutionary posturing curdle into farce before it turns lethal.
£1.99
About the book
A backstreet shop in Soho sells smutty postcards and rubber goods to men who slip in sideways, and behind the counter its owner does as little as he can get away with. Adolf Verloc is a secret agent for a foreign embassy, paid to keep watch on London's anarchists, until his handlers demand something showier: a bomb at the Greenwich Observatory, an attack on the first meridian itself, on time, on nothing anyone can be blamed for. Verloc hands the parcel to Stevie, his wife's brother, a gentle, simple-minded boy who trips on the way and is blown to pieces in the grass. Conrad tells this with a droll, pitiless irony, watching fanatics and functionaries alike congratulate themselves on causes that are, every one, ridiculous, while the real love in the book, Winnie's fierce guardianship of the brother she married a dull man to protect, curdles into something the city never sees coming. What she does next she does in silence, and the silence is the most frightening sound in English fiction.