Joseph Conrad
The life
Joseph Conrad was a Polish-born British novelist who did not learn English properly until his twenties and wrote all his fiction in it, his third language. Orphaned young and raised under Russian rule in what is now Ukraine, he spent sixteen years at sea and rose to master mariner before Almayer's Folly launched a second career. Lord Jim, Nostromo and Heart of Darkness followed.
The Secret Sharer
48 pages — the shortest way into Conrad, not the greatest.
On my right hand there were lines of fishing stakes resembling a mysterious system of half-submerged bamboo fences, incomprehensible in its division of the domain of tropical fishes, and crazy of aspect as if abandoned forever by some nomad tribe of fishermen now gone to the other end of the ocean; for there was no…
