Nostromo: Conrad’s Epic of Silver and Power

Heart of Darkness made Conrad famous, but many who know his work best think his true masterpiece is Nostromo — a vast, difficult, dazzling novel about a silver mine in an invented South American country, and the way the silver corrupts everyone it touches.

Conrad builds a whole nation — its revolutions, its dictators, its harbour and mountains and mines — and then shows a fortune in silver moving through it like a slow poison. The idealist, the cynic, the incorruptible man of the people called Nostromo: one by one the silver finds the flaw in each of them. It is the great novel of what Conrad called ‘material interests’ — the way money and power hollow out even the people who believe they are above them.

It is not an easy read; the timeline loops, the perspective shifts, and Conrad demands your full attention. But it repays it as few novels do, because it saw, a century early, the whole modern story of resource, empire, and the corruption that follows wealth into the ground. Every novel of globalization and its discontents is downstream of it.

This edition gathers it with Conrad’s other major works, including Lord Jim.

Read The Essential Joseph Conrad →