Most Popular Books by Graham Greene

Meticulously chosen and engagingly annotated, this selection of letters many of them seen here for the first time gives an entirely new perspective on a life that combined literary achievement, political action, espionage, exotic travel and romantic entanglement. In several letters, the individuals, events or places described provide the inspiration for characters, episodes or locations found in his later fiction. The correspondence describes his travels in Mexico, Africa, Malaya, Vietnam, Haiti, Cuba, Sierra Leone, Liberia and other trouble spots, where he observed the struggles of victims and victors with a compassionate and truthful eye. The volume includes a vast number of unpublished letters to authors Evelyn Waugh, Auberon Waugh, Anthony Powell, Edith Sitwell, R.K. Narayan and Muriel Spark, and to other more notorious individuals such as the double-agent Kim Philby.

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.

“What a plot! They don''t make movies like this anymore—or novels, either, except by Graham Greene” —(USA TODAY) From the author of the classics Brighton Rock and The Quiet American, a morally complex tale about a man at the mercy of deadly forces while being held in a German prison camp during World War II—featuring a new preface by Michael Korda and an introduction by the author. When Jean-Louis Chauvel, a French lawyer incarcerated in a German prison camp, is informed by his captors that three prisoners must die, he devises a plan for survival. Offering everything he owns to a fellow prisoner if he will take Chauvel’s place, he manages to escape the firing squad but soon discovers that he will continue to pay for this act for the rest of his life. An unforgettable and suspenseful novel that “deserves a place at the top of the list of world’s best literature inspired by the war” (Houston Chronicle), The Tenth Man will haunt you long after you turn the final page.

A detective and a chorus girl stalk the shadows of a murderer in this thriller from "a pioneer of the modern mood we now think of as noir" ( LA Weekly ). Born out of a brutal childhood, Raven is an assassin for hire whose latest hit—a government minister—is one calculated to ignite a war. When the most wanted man in England is paid off in marked bills, he also becomes the easiest to track—and police detective Jimmy Mather has the lead. But Raven''s got an advantage. Crossing paths with a sympathetic dancer named Anne Crowder, the emotionally scarred Raven has found someone in the wreckage of his life he can trust, maybe his only hope for salvation. Because Anne is also Mather''s fiancée. Now the fate of two men will depend on her. And either way, it''s betrayal. With its themes of deception, double cross, and the consequences of indiscriminate passion, the breathless cinematic narrative of Graham Greene''s thriller was adapted in the classic 1942 film noir, This Gun for Hire, starring Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake. Praise for Graham Greene "A superb storyteller with a gift for provoking controversy." — The New York Times "Graham Greene had wit and grace and character and story and a transcendent universal compassion that places him for all time in the ranks of world literature." —John le Carré, New York Times–bestselling author of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold

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

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).

This collection of seventeen interviews covers fifty years. Here the eminent author of The Power and the Glory, The Third Man, and The Heart of the Matter speaks of himself, his life, and his works. Though reluctant to be interviewed, especially by an academic or journalist he did not know, Greene was more at ease in an interview with a personal friend, who he felt would be less likely to misunderstand or misquote him. Yet even his good friend V. S. Pritchett spent considerable time trying to pin him down for his 1978 interview. When he finally did arrange an interview, Pritchett tells that Greene''s "flat conspiratorial, laughing voice . . ., of itself, makes him the best company I''ve known in the last forty years". Other interviewers--included here are V. S. Naipaul and Penelope Gilliatt--shared Pritchett''s opinion, but many found that he avoided idle conversation for fear that his words would be misconstrued. Greene''s anxiety was not without foundation. In an interview with Michael Menshaw, Greene explained: "It''s got so I hate to say who I am or what I believe...A few years ago I told an interviewer I''m a gnostic. The next day''s newspaper announced that I had become an agnostic". After such incidents, Greene turned to the anecdote--relating an experience with Fidel Castro or with Papa Doc Duvalier--to communicate in interviews with strangers. Nevertheless, in all the interviews Greene granted over the years, the reader hears very clearly the voice of a man whose conversation is as painfully honest and unpretentious as is his written prose. The interviews here are divided chronologically into four periods, loosely related to his subject matter or to his reputation at the time of theinterview. Thus the reader sees the development of the writer from a callow but gifted young man into one of the foremost men of letters in the English-speaking world.

Querry, a world famous architect, is the victim of a terrible attack of indifference: he no longer finds meaning in art of pleasure in life. Arriving anonymously at a Congo leper village, he is diagnosed as the mental equivalent of a ''burnt-out case'', a leper who has gone through a stage of mutilation. However, as Querry loses himself in work for the lepers his disease of mind slowly approaches a cure. Then the white community finds out who Querry is...

A retired London bank manager is yanked out of the suburbs by his eccentric aunt for a "cheerfully irreverent" romp across Europe ( The Guardian). Now that the dullish Henry Pulling has left his job with an agreeable pension and a firm handshake, he plans to spend more time weeding his dahlias. Then, for the first time in fifty years, he sees his aunt Augusta at his mother''s funeral. Charging into her seventies with florid abandon, not a day of her life wasted, and her future as bright as her brilliant red hair, Augusta insists that Henry abandon his garden, follow her, and hold on tight. With that, she whisks her nephew out of Brighton and boards the Orient Express bound for Paris and Istanbul, then on to Paraguay, and down the rabbit hole of her past that swarms with swindlers, smugglers, war criminals, and rather unconventional lovers. With each new stop, Henry discovers not only more about his aunt and her secrets but also about himself as well. Pulsing with "the tragic and comic ironies of love, loyalty and belief" Graham Greene''s deceptive lark of novel was made into the 1972 film starring Maggie Smith ( The Times, London).

A leak is traced to a small sub-section of the secret service, sparking off the inevitable security checks, tensions and suspicions. The sort of atmosphere, perhaps, where mistakes could be made? For Maurice Castle, it is the end of the line anyway, and time for him to retire to live peacefully with his wife and child. But no-one escapes so easily from the lonely, isolated, neurotic world of the SIS

In a range of work including novels of literary suspense that test both their protagonists souls and their readers nerves to the breaking point, Graham Greene explored a territory located somewhere on the border between despair and faith, treachery and love. This volume includes the complete novels "The Heart of the Matter" and "The Third Man," along with excerpts from ten other novels; short stories; selections from Greenes 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.

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

"Greene had wit and grace and character and story and a transcendent universal compassion that places him for all time in the ranks of world literature…" —John le Carré Graham Greene’s first published novel tells the story of Andrews, a young man who has betrayed his fellow smugglers and fears their vengeance. Fleeing from them, with no hope of pity or salvation, he takes refuge in the house of a young woman, also alone in the world. Elizabeth persuades him to give evidence against his accomplices in court, but neither she nor Andrews is aware that to both criminals and authority, treachery is as great a crime as smuggling. The first step in a brilliant career, The Man Within offers a foretaste of Green’s recurring themes of religion, the individual’s struggles against cynicism, and the indifferent forces of a hostile world. This Penguin Classics edition features an introduction by Jonathan Yardley. 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.

In England during World War II, an American writer and the bored wife of a British civil servant fall in love, then she mysteriously ends the affair.

His mind crowded with vivid images of Africa, Graham Greene set off in 1935 to discover Liberia, a remote and unfamiliar republic founded for released slaves. Now with a new introduction by Paul Theroux, "Journey Without Maps" is the spellbinding record of Greenes journey. Crossing the red-clay terrain from Sierra Leone to the coast of Grand Bassa with a chain of porters, he came to know one of the few areas of Africa untouched by colonization. Western civilization had not yet impinged on either the human psyche or the social structure, and neither poverty, disease, nor hunger seemed able to quell the native spirit. BACKCOVER: One of the best travel books [of the twentieth] century. Norman Sherry "Journey Without Maps" and "The Lawless Roads" reveal Greenes ravening spiritual hunger, a desperate need to touch rock bottom within the self and in the humanly created world. "The Times Higher Education Supplement"

In London during the Blitz, an amnesiac must outwit a twisted Nazi plot in this "master thriller" of espionage, murder, and deception ( Time). On a peaceful Sunday afternoon, Arthur Rowe comes upon a charity fete in the gardens of a Cambridgeshire vicarage where he wins a game of chance. If only this were an ordinary day. Britain is under threat by Germany, and the air raid sirens that bring the bazaar to a halt expose Rowe as no ordinary man. Recently released from a psychiatric prison for the mercy killing of his wife, he is burdened by guilt, and now, in possession of a seemingly innocuous prize, on the run from a nest of Nazi spies who want him dead. Pursued on a dark odyssey through the bombed-out streets of London, he becomes enmeshed in a tangle of secrets that reach into the dark recesses of his own forgotten past. And there isn''t a soul he can trust, not even himself. Because Arthur Rowe doesn''t even know who he really is. "A storyteller of genius," Graham Greene composed his serpentine mystery of authentic wartime espionage—and one the author''s personal favorites—while working for MI6 (Evelyn Waugh). But The Ministry of Fear "is more than a mere thriller . . . [it''s a] hypnotic moonstone of a novel" ( The New York Times).

Copies 1 and 2 in circulation.

The centenary edition with a new introduction by Paul Theroux: three men meet on a ship bound for Haiti. Hiding behind their actors’ masks, they hesitate on the edge of life — afraid of love, afraid of pain, afraid of fear itself.