In the Library
Typhoon
Joseph Conrad, 1902
- Form
- Form Novella
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 2.5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 7
- Length
- Length 31k 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.
Facing it—always facing it—that's the way to get through.
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
Lord Jim
Joseph Conrad
Conrad's other study of what a seaman is worth in the one moment that tests him, except Jim fails his and spends a life answering for it.
£1.99
Moby-Dick
Herman Melville
Melville's captain has every scrap of the imagination MacWhirr lacks, and it destroys him; read together, the sea looks like two different gods.
£1.99
About the book
The barometer in the chart-room of the Nan-Shan is falling in a way that should frighten anybody, and the man reading it feels nothing at all. Captain MacWhirr has just enough imagination to carry him through each day and no more, so he steams into the storm, because going round a thing you cannot picture strikes him as nonsense. What follows is the finest weather ever written in English. The gale does not simply blow: it comes at a man like a personal enemy, takes hold of his limbs, fastens on his mind, and tries to drive the spirit out of him. Below decks two hundred Chinese passengers roll in the dark among their burst sea chests while seven years of silver dollars run loose across the deck, and that fight is worse than the sea. Then the dullest captain in English fiction brings her through, sits down in his shirtsleeves, and counts the money back out by hand.