Set in late-nineteenth-century London, Joseph Conrad's intense political thriller anticipates the espionage novels of such writers as Graham Greene and John le Carre. It concerns a double agent who is charged with provoking the radical group he has infiltrated into an act of sabotage that will bring about its own destruction. In a marvelously drawn underworld of political and criminal intrigue, Conrad brilliantly explores the confused motives that lie at the heart of terrorism. Extraor-dinarily modern in the ironic view it takes of human affairs, this masterly tale of conspiracy builds to a climax that the critic F. R. Leavis called "one of the most astonishing triumphs of genius in fiction."