Titles in this set includes:

1) Victory

2) The Secret Agent

3) Nostromo

4) Lord Jim

5) Heart of Darkness Description:

1) Victory

Axel Heyst,a dreamer and a restless drifter,believes he can avoid suffering by cutting himself off from others. Then hebecomes involved in the operation of a coal company on a remote island in theMalay Archipelago, and when it fails he turns his back on humanity once more.But his life alters whenhe rescues a young English girl, Lena, fromZangiacomo’s Ladies’ Orchestra and the evil innkeeper Schomberg, taking her tohis island retreat. The affair between Heyst and Lena begins with her release,but the relationship shifts as Lena struggles to save Heyst from detachment andisolation.

2) The Secret Agent

In the only novel Conrad set in London, The Secret Agentcommunicates a profoundly ironic view of human affairs. The story is wovenaround an attack on the Greenwich Observatory in 1894 masterminded by Verloc, aRussian spy working for the police, and ostensibly a member of an anarchistgroup in Soho. His masters instruct him to discredit the anarchists in ahumiliating fashion, and when his evil plan goes horribly awry, Verloc mustdeal with the repercussions of his actions.

3) Nostromo

Nostromo, published in 1904, is one of Conrad’s finestworks. Nostromo — though one hundred years old — says as much about today’sLatin America as any of the finest recent accounts of that region’s turbulentpolitical life. Insistently dramatic in its storytelling, spectacular in itsrecreation of the subtropical landscape, this picture of an insurrectionarysociety and the opportunities it provides for moral corruption gleams on everypage with its author’s dry, undeceived, impeccable intelligence.

4) Lord Jim

This compact novel, completed in 1900, as with so many ofthe great novels of the time, is at its baseline a book of the sea. An Englishboy in a simple town has dreams bigger than the outdoors and embarks at anearly age into the sailor’s life. The waters he travels reward him with theability to explore the human spirit, while Joseph Conrad launches the storyinto both an exercise of his technical prowess and a delicately crafted pictureof a character who reaches the status of a literary hero.

5) Heart of Darkness

Generally regarded as the pre-eminent work of Conrad’sshorter fiction, Heart of Darkness is a chilling tale of horror which, as theauthor intended, is capable of many interpretations. Set in the Congo duringthe period of rapid colonial expansion in the 19th century, the story dealswith the highly disturbing effects of economic, social and politicalexploitation of European and African societies and the cataclysmic behaviourthis induced in some individuals.