Tales of Hearsay

Conrad's final collection returns to the form that made him great: the haunting tale of moral entanglement. These four stories share a preoccupation with what cannot be known for certain yet must be acted upon anyway. In Napoleonic Russia, a young officer faces an unthinkable request. A Polish boy meets a real prince and discovers that legends lie. During the Great War, a British ship captain must judge a neutral vessel whose captain may or may not be lying. And aboard a sailing ship with a terrible secret, an officer serves a captain consumed by spiritualist obsession, desperate to communicate with the dead. What unites these tales is Conrad's fixation on the fragility of truth. Every narrator hedges, doubts, remembers imperfectly. The title itself is a confession: these are stories told at second hand, filtered through memory's unreliable current. Conrad understood that most of what we know about the world comes not from direct experience but from hearsay, and that this has always been enough to damn us or save us.