The Secret Agent
by Joseph Conrad
The Secret Agent is the unsurpassed ancestor of a long series of twentieth-century novels and films which explore the confused motives that lieat the heart of political terrorism. In its use of powerful psychological insight to intensify narrative suspense, it set the terms by which subsequentworks in its genre were created. Conrad was the first novelist to discover the strange in-between territory of the political exile, and his genius wassuch that we still have no truer map of that region's moral terrain than his story of a terrorist plot and its tragic consequences for the guilty andinnocent alike.