Within The Tides

Conrad at his most concentrated: four tales of obsession, betrayal, and the dark corners of human motive. In the South Pacific, a self-important philosopher and his beautiful daughter sail toward her wrongly accused fiancé, only to discover that desire and deception shadow every island shore. A Napoleonic-era officer in Spain confronts something far more terrifying than French soldiers when he attempts to sleep in a bed once occupied by an Archbishop. And in the Far East, a kind steamer captain's routine errand to collect silver dollars becomes a brutal encounter with three ruthless men, the most dangerous of whom has no hands. These are stories of men undone by their own ambitions, of women reduced to prizes, of empire's crushing weight on those who serve it. Conrad's prose is leaner here than in his major novels, more stripped-down, but no less corrosive. The man who wrote "Heart of Darkness" turns his penetrating eye on smaller canvases with devastating precision.