The Secret Agent

by Joseph Conrad

First published 1907

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3.6(25,835)

Adolf Verloc keeps a small shop in Soho while informing for a foreign embassy and maintaining contacts among London’s anarchists. When his diplomatic handler demands an outrage dramatic enough to provoke public repression, Verloc plans an attack on Greenwich Observatory. He draws his vulnerable brother-in-law Stevie into the scheme, but the bomb explodes prematurely and leaves Verloc facing the consequences inside his own household.

The investigation moves between police officials, diplomats, political radicals and the Verloc family, showing how each institution manipulates people while claiming to preserve order. Winnie Verloc’s discovery of what happened to Stevie turns an international conspiracy into a domestic tragedy. The novel combines espionage and crime with a bleak satire of late-Victorian political violence, secret policing and the distance between ideological rhetoric and individual suffering.