The Secret Agent

Adolf Verloc keeps a shabby London shop, a comfortable marriage, and a secret second life as a paid informer. When a foreign embassy orders him to prove his worth by bombing the Greenwich Observatory, he draws his wife’s gentle, vulnerable brother Stevie into a scheme that ends in disaster and quiet domestic horror. Joseph Conrad based the story loosely on a real 1894 explosion and turned it into a cold, ironic study of anarchists, police, spies, and the ordinary people crushed between them. First published in 1907, the novel now reads as one of the earliest and most unsettling portraits of terrorism and its bungling, self-serving conspirators. Grim, sardonic, and morally exact, it stands among Conrad’s finest work. Available as a free PDF and EPUB.