Secret Sharer

On a moonless night off the coast of Thailand, a young ship captain makes a decision that will haunt him. He discovers a man named Leggatt clinging to the side of his vessel, an escaped murderer who has killed a crewmate in a moment of violence. Instead of turning him in, the captain hides Leggatt in his own quarters, beginning a strange and intimate relationship that unfolds in the cramped darkness of the ship. What drives a respectable officer to harbor a killer? Conrad penetrates deep into the captain's psyche, revealing a man torn between his public duty and a private identification with this fugitive stranger. The two men mirror each other: Leggatt has acted on impulses the captain has only imagined, and in sheltering him, the captain tests the boundaries of his own identity. The Secret Sharer is psychological fiction at its most precise, a tense meditation on what we conceal from the world and from ourselves, told with Conrad's signature mastery of atmosphere and moral ambiguity.