The complete mature fiction of Joseph Conrad in a single annotated volume. Twelve novels and novellas — the entire arc from Almayer’s Folly (1895) to The Shadow-Line (1917) — with an original critical apparatus.
A Polish exile who spent twenty years at sea before writing a sentence of fiction, Conrad produced some of the greatest English prose of the modern era in a language he learned as an adult. The novels gathered here shaped Greene, Le Carré, Naipaul, Achebe, García Márquez, and Coetzee. They are reproduced in chronological order, with editorial footnotes and a sustained critical study placed at the end of the volume — so the reader can encounter the fiction first.
Almayer’s Folly (1895) — the debut: a failed Dutch trader on a forgotten river in Borneo.
The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897) — the sea novella whose preface became modernism’s manifesto: “to make you hear, to make you feel — it is, before all, to make you see.”
Youth (1898) — the introduction of Charlie Marlow, narrator of Conrad’s deepest fictions.
Heart of Darkness (1899) — Marlow’s journey up the Congo; the source of Apocalypse Now; the founding text of an entire postcolonial literature.
Lord Jim (1900) — the most ambitious of the Marlow novels: a romantic young officer who jumps from a sinking ship and spends his life trying to understand what kind of man he is.
Typhoon (1902) — Captain MacWhirr, the dullest man imaginable, sailing into the worst weather any ship ever survived.
Nostromo (1904) — the political masterpiece: a fictional South American republic, a silver mine, a revolution. F. R. Leavis called it Conrad’s supreme achievement.
The Secret Agent (1907) — the London anarchist novel, the bombed observatory, the policeman and the spy.
Under Western Eyes (1911) — Conrad’s reckoning with Dostoevsky: a student in Petersburg, a revolutionary murder, an exile in Geneva.
Chance (1913), Victory (1915), and The Shadow-Line (1917) — the late masterpieces: commercial success after twenty years of obscurity, the dark tropical fable, and the farewell to the sea.
✦ Twelve major works — virtually Conrad’s entire essential output as a novelist — in a single volume.
This edition also includes:
✦ The Polish Captain Who Wrote England’s Greatest Modern Prose — an original five-part critical study covering Conrad’s life as a writer in his third language, the formal innovation of the Marlow novels, the imperial question and the long debate over Heart of Darkness, the modern inheritance from Greene through Naipaul, and the case for reading Conrad today.
✦ A substantial author biography in five chapters.
✦ Editorial footnotes throughout: nautical terminology, geography, French and Latin phrases, historical and political context where it matters.
✦ A complete editorial note on the sources of the texts.
For readers who enjoy:
✦ Graham Greene, John le Carré, V. S. Naipaul, J. M. Coetzee — the long modern lineage Conrad founded.
✦ The Penguin Classics and Oxford World’s Classics editions of modernist fiction.
✦ Henry James, Ford Madox Ford, and the international novel of consciousness around 1900.
✦ Political fiction that takes its politics as seriously as its form.
This is the working Conrad shelf in a single volume: enough fiction to occupy a serious reader for months, with the apparatus needed to enter the work with the right questions.
“My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel — it is, before all, to make you see. That — and no more, and it is everything.”
— Joseph Conrad, preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus, 1897
