Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time
The Secret Agent is the unsurpassed ancestor of a long series of twentieth-century novels and films which explore the confused motives that lie
at the heart of political terrorism. In its use of powerful psychological insight to intensify narrative suspense, it set the terms by which subsequent
works in its genre were created. Conrad was the first novelist to discover the strange in-between territory of the political exile, and his genius was
such 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 and
innocent alike.