Most Popular Books by Graham Greene

"Judiciously edited and engagingly annotated, this collection of Greene''s personal letters - including many that were unavailable to his official biographer - gives new perspective to a life that combined literary achievement, political action, espionage, travel, and romantic entanglement. Following Greene through joy and turmoil, from the gnarled and fissured forests of Indo-China to war-torn Sierra Leone, from the mountains of Switzerland to hotels in Havana, Richard Greene''s superbly edited collection is a vivid portrait of a fascinating writer, a mercurial man of courage, wit, and passion."--BOOK JACKET.

During World War II a group of men is held prisoner by the Germans, who determine that three of them must die. This is the story of how one of those men trades his wealth for his life--and lives to pay for his act in utterly unexpected ways.

A tormented, alcoholic priest is pursued by an idealistic lieutenant during an anti-clerical persecution in Mexico.

The “strikingly original” debut novel by the masterful British author is “a perfect adventure” of love and smuggling on the English coast (The Nation). Francis Andrews is a reluctant smuggler living in the shadow of his brutish father’s legacy. To exorcise the ghosts of the man he loathes, Andrews betrays his colleagues to authorities and takes flight across the downs. It’s here that he stumbles upon the isolated cottage of a beguiling stranger named Elizabeth—an empathetic young woman who is just as lonely, every bit the outsider as he, and reconciling a troubling past of her own. Andrews, a man on the run from those he exposed, believes he’s found refuge and salvation. But when Elizabeth encourages him to return to the courts of Lewes and give evidence against his accomplices, the treacherous and deadly repercussions may be beyond their control. “The ultimate strengths of [Graham] Greene’s books is that he shows us the hazards of compassion,” a theme that would find its earliest expression in The Man Within, his first published novel (Pico Iyer).

With his “sheer mastery of narrative,” the British novelist takes a detour into the uncanny and wondrously absurd in these “compelling” stories (The Guardian). An ambitious departure for an author renowned for his realism, this collection of short fiction “collectively . . . [engages] in a reconnaissance through the dustier reaches of man’s experience with [the] spectres of doubt, defeat, failure and paradox” (Kirkus Reviews). In “Under the Garden,” William Wilditch, a restless loner given to wanderlust, takes one final journey as he approaches death—back to his childhood home where he discovers that the memories of his youth are simply not to be believed. In “A Visit to Morin,” an admirer and old friend of a once-renowned Catholic writer is unprepared for the startling confessions of the spiritually bereft, now-reclusive scribe. On a vast plantation, a peculiar wish is granted a poor leper by his physician-in-charge—and for one rowdy winter night, a “Dream of a Strange Land” becomes a reality. Finally, for a group of children scouting the apocalyptic ruins at the edge of their village, “A Discovery in the Woods” opens their eyes to a lost world they never knew existed. With these versatile forays into myth, memory, magic realism, and dystopian futures, Greene once again proves himself “a storyteller of genius” (Evelyn Waugh).

Relates the story of the politically motivated kidnapping of Charlie Fortnum, a minor British functionary in Argentina.

An assistant police commissioner in a West African coastal town lets passion overrule his honor

When Graham Greene died in 1991, at the age of 86, his reputation as a great Catholic writer was assured. His books reflected an awareness of sin and confronted discomfiting themes with a sombre eye. The British Catholic journal The Tablet provided Greene with a forum for both his works-in-progress and his sometimes unorthodox religious views. For the first time, Graham Greenes Tablet contributions are collected in one volume. Much of the journalism has not been seen for fifty years.

Maurice Castle is a high-level operative in the British secret service during the Cold War. He is deeply in love with his African wife, who escaped apartheid South Africa with the help of his communist friend. Despite his misgivings, Castle decides to act as a double agent, passing information to the Soviets to help his in-laws in South Africa. In order to evade detection, he allows his assistant to be wrongly identified as the source of the leaks. But when suspicions remain, Castle is forced to make an even more excruciating sacrifice to save himself. Originally published in 1978, The Human Factor is an exciting novel of espionage drawn from Greene’s own experiences in MI6 during World War II, and ultimately a deeply humanistic examination of the very nature of loyalty. This edition features a new introduction by Colm Tóibín. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

A famous architect struggling with a crisis of faith escapes to a leper colony in the Congo, in Graham Greene’s “greatest novel” (Time). Querry is a world-renowned architect noted for his magnificent churches, each designed not for the glory of God, but for the satisfaction of self. Suddenly infected with indifference, he has abandoned his pursuit of pleasure. Now he has reached the end of desire at the end of the world—a colony of lepers in the remote jungles of Africa. Here, under the guidance of Doctor Colin, a fellow atheist, Querry’s consideration of the sick could be something close to a cure for his own suffering. So too, it first seems, could a local plantation owner’s lonely and abused wife—Querry’s unlikely confessor. But when Querry reluctantly agrees to build a hospital and his good intentions brand him a modern-day saint, all the intrusive and dangerous piety of civilization returns. And this time it could be inescapable. From “the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man’s consciousness and anxiety” comes Graham Greene’s celebrated novel about the consequences of conviction, the sickness of the soul, and the tenuous endurance of the human spirit (William Golding).

After a man is almost killed in a bombing raid, the married woman with whom he has been having an affair breaks away from him.

In Greene’s “magnificent tour-de-force among tales of international intrigue,” rival agents engage in a deadly game of cat and mouse in prewar England (The New York Times). D., a widowed professor of Romance literature, has arrived in Dover on a peaceful yet important mission. He’s to negotiate a contract to buy coal for his country, one torn by civil war. With it, there’s a chance to defeat fascist influences. Without it, the loyalists will fail. When D. strikes up a romantic acquaintance with the estranged but solicitous daughter of a powerful coal-mining magnate, everything appears to be in his favor—if not for a counteragent who has come to England with the intent of sabotaging every move he makes. Accused of forgery and theft, and roped into a charge of murder, D. becomes a hunted man, hemmed in at every turn by an ever-tightening net of intrigue and double cross, with no one left to trust but himself. Written during the height of the Spanish Civil War, Graham Greene’s “exciting . . . kaleidoscopic affair” was the basis for the classic 1945 thriller starring Charles Boyer and Lauren Bacall (The Sunday Times).

Victor Baxter is a young boy when a secretive stranger known simply as “the Captain” takes him from his boarding school to live in London. Victor becomes the surrogate son and companion of a woman named Liza, who renames him “Jim” and depends on him for any news about the world outside their door. Raised in these odd yet touching circumstances, Jim is never quite sure of Liza’s relationship to the Captain, who is often away on mysterious errands. It is not until Jim reaches manhood that he confronts the Captain and learns the shocking truth about the man, his allegiances, and the nature of love. This Penguin Classics edition features an introduction by John Auchard. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

A hapless salesman in Cuba is recruited into Cold War spy games in Greene’s classic “comical, satirical, atmospherical” novel (The Daily Telegraph). James Wormold, a cash-strapped vacuum cleaner salesman in Havana, finds the answer to his prayers when British Intelligence offers him a lucrative job as an undercover agent. To keep the checks coming, Wormold must at least pretend to know what he’s doing. Soon, he’s apparently deciphering incomprehensible codes, passing along sketches of secret weapons that look suspiciously like vacuum parts, and claiming to recruit fellow operatives from his country club, all to create the perfect picture of intrigue. But when MI6 dispatches a secretary to oversee his endeavors, Wormold fears his carelessly fabricated world will come undone. Instead, it all comes true. Somehow, he’s become the target of an assassin, and it’s going to take more than a fib to get out of Cuba alive. Her Majesty’s man in Havana may have to resort to spying. Named one of the 20 Best Spy Novels of All Time by the Telegraph and adapted into the classic 1959 comedy starring Alec Guinness, Our Man in Havana is “high-comic mayhem . . . weirdly undated . . . [and] bizarrely prescient” (Christopher Buckley, New York Times–bestselling author).

Strangers in Port-au-Prince are united in the corruption, fear, and revolt of Duvalier-era Haiti in “the most interesting novel of [Greene’s] career” (The Nation). Haiti, under the rule of Papa Doc and his menacing paramilitary, the Tontons Macoute, has long been abandoned by tourists. Now it is home to corrupt capitalists, foreign ambassadors and their lonely wives—and a small group of enterprising strangers rocking into port on the Dutch cargo ship, Medea: a well-meaning pair of Americans claiming to bring vegetarianism to the natives; a former jungle fighter in World War II Burma and current confidence man; and an English hotelier returning home to the Trianon, an unsalable shell of an establishment on the hills above the capital. Each is embroiled in a charade. But when they’re unsuspectingly bound together in this nightmare republic of squalid poverty, torrid love affairs, and impending violence, their masks will be stripped away. “While Mr. Greene . . . specialized in chronicling the moral and political murkiness he encountered in the third world . . . nowhere did he produce a more topical or damning work of fiction than [in The Comedians]” (The New York Times). Banned in Haiti, and condemned by Papa Doc Duvalier, it was adapted by Greene into a 1967 film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.

In his essays, criticism, screenplays, autobiography, and novels, Graham Greene explored a territory located somewhere on the border between despair and faith, treachery and love. This cross-section of Greene’s work was originally selected with the author’s help in 1973 and has now been extensively revised and updated. It includes the complete novels The Heart of the Matter and The Third Man, along with excerpts from ten other novels; short stories; selections from Greene’s memoirs and travel writings; essays on English and American literature; and public statements on issues that range from repression in the Soviet Union to torture in Northern Ireland to the paradoxical virtue of disloyalty. An extensive critical and biographical introduction, headnotes, chronology, and bibliography by editor Philip Stratford make The Portable Graham Greene as invaluable for scholars as it is essential for any traveler through Greene’s richly menacing and strangely seductive literary landscapes. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

A master of twentieth century fiction, Graham Greene looks back on his life. This volume also includes several key interviews from throughout his long, fruitful career. Graham Greene led one of the most extraordinary lives of the twentieth century. The son of a Hertfordshire headmaster, he quickly discovered a love for writing, beginning a career that would last a lifetime. Greene''s fascination with global politics took him around the world, to places that would become the settings for many of his most famous novels: Mexico (The Power and the Glory), Sierra Leone (The Heart of the Matter), and Haiti (The Comedians) - among dozens of other far-flung locations. He produced masterpieces throughout his life, many of which now stand as indisputably canonical: Brighton Rock, The End of the Affair, and The Quiet American to name but a few.

The detective, Mather, searches for a professional assassin, who unknowingly has kidnapped Mather''s fiancee

This autobiographical essay is a sequel to "A Sort of Life". It describes the conception, the writing and the publishing of each of Greene''s books - interspersed with accounts of his travels in Kenya and Vietnam, and the portraits of a few of his closest friends.

The complete script by Graham Greene with additions and omissions by Carol Reed for the film indicated

"A Catholic tours Mexico and finds little to his liking, and plenty to condemn. The anti-Catholic movements have prejudiced him in advance, and he travels down from Texas, with a chip on his shoulder, looking for things to criticize. He succeeds in getting plenty to feed his distaste and he pours it all forth in this volume, -- places, people, travel accommodation, scenery, food, lodgings -- he was acutely miserable throughout. Stringent antidote to usual enthusiasm for Mexico and things Mexican. Particular market -- the Catholics who want food for their wrath."--Kirkus

A teenage sociopath rises to power in Britain’s criminal underworld in this “brilliant and uncompromising” thriller (The New York Times). Seventeen-year-old Pinkie Brown, raised amid the casual violence and corruption in the dire prewar Brighton slums, has left his final judgment in the hands of God. On the streets, impelled by his own twisted moral doctrine, he leads a motley pack of gangsters whose sleazy little rackets have most recently erupted in the murder of an informant. Pinkie’s attempts to cover their tracks have led him into the bed of a timid and lovestruck young waitress named Rose—his new wife, the key witness to his crimes, and, should she live long enough, his alibi. But loitering in the shadows is another woman, Ida Arnold—an avenging angel determined to do right by Pinkie’s latest victim. Adapted for film in both 1948 and 2010 and for the stage as both a drama and musical, and serving as an inspiration to such disparate artists as Morrissey, John Barry, and Queen, “this bleak, seething and anarchic novel still resonate[s]” (The Guardian).

Kriminalroman. En kærlighedshistorie udspiller sig i toget, mellem hvis passagerer også er en morder på flugt og en politisk flygtning i livsfare

First published: Heinemann, 1943.

When Father Quixote, a local priest of the Spanish village of El Toboso who claims ancestry to Cervantes? fictional Don Quixote, is elevated to the rank of monsignor through a clerical error, he sets out on a journey to Madrid to purchase purple socks appropriate to his new station. Accompanying him on his mission is his best friend, Sancho, the Communist ex-mayor of the village who argues politics and religion with Quixote and rescues him from the various troubles his innocence lands him in along the way.

A collection of ten stories, the first written in 1923 and the last in 1988. These will be arranged in chronological order reversed and there will be a short preface by the author. These stories have been previously published in a selection of magazines and newspapers (the two most recently in the ''Independent'').

This eyewitness account of religious and political persecution in 1930s Mexico inspired the British novelist’s “masterpiece,” The Power and the Glory (John Updike). In 1938, Graham Greene, a burgeoning convert to Roman Catholicism, was commissioned to expose the anticlerical purges in Mexico by President Plutarco Elías Calles. Churches had been destroyed, peasants held secret masses in their homes, religious icons were banned, and priests disappeared. Traveling under the growing clouds of fascism, Greene was anxious to see for himself the effect it had on the people—what he found was a combination of despair, resignation, and fierce resilience. Journeying through the rugged and remote terrain of Chiapas and Tabasco, Greene’s emotional, gut response to the landscape, the sights and sounds, the fears, the oppressive heat, and the state of mind under “the fiercest persecution of religion anywhere since the reign of Elizabeth” makes for a vivid and candid account, and stands alone as a “singularly beautiful travel book” (New Statesman). Hailed by William Golding as “the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man’s consciousness and anxiety,” Greene would draw on the experiences of The Lawless Roads for one of his greatest novels, The Power and the Glory.

Greene’s “sharply, often incisively etched” novel of the interlocked fates of unwary strangers on a train from Belgium to Constantinople (The New York Times). The Orient Express has embarked from Ostend for a three-day journey to Cologne, Vienna, and Constantinople. The passenger list includes a Jewish trader from London with business interests in Turkey—and a score to settle; a vulnerable chorus girl on her last legs; a boozy and spiteful journalist who’s found an unrequited love in her paid companion, and her latest scoop in second class—a Serbian dissident in disguise on his way to lead a revolution; and a murderer on the run looking for a getaway. As the train hurtles across Europe, the fates of everyone on board will collide long before the Orient Express rushes headlong to its final destination. Originally published in the UK as Stamboul Train in 1932, Graham Greene’s “novel has movement, variety, interest; taken on the surface, it is an interesting and entertaining story of adventure, penetrated through and through with the consciousness of the on-rushing train, with that curious sense of the temporary suspension of one’s ordinary existence which comes to many on ship or train” (The New York Times).

Murder story involving Stockholm financier, and a brother and a sister.

A skeptical British journalist and an eager young American are involved in local intrigue and a perilous venture behind Communist lines.