The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (Penguin Classics)

"The Secret Agent is an astonishing book. It is one of the best--and certainly the most significant--detective stories ever written." --Ford Madox Ford "The Secret Agent is an altogether thrilling 'crime story' . . . a political novel of a foreign embassy intrigue and its tragic human outcome." --Thomas Mann "One of Conrad's supreme masterpieces." --F. R. Leavis "[The Secret Agent] was in effect the world's first political thriller--spies, conspirators, wily policemen, murders, bombings . . . Conrad was also giving artistic expression to his domestic anxieties--his overweight wife and problem child, his lack of money, his inactivity, his discomfort in London, his uneasiness in English society, his sense of exile, of being an alien . . . The novel has the perverse logic and derangement of a dream." --from the Introduction to the Everyman's Library edition by Paul Theroux