Youth: Classic Tales Edition

Joseph Conrad

Sep 2014 · B.J. Harrison · Narrated by B.J. Harrison

About this audiobook

Marlowe tells a tale of his youth, before he ventured into the Heart of Darkness. After several false starts, he signs as second officer on a trading ship to Bangkok.

Before their final disembarkation, he discovers that all the rats are abandoning ship before they had even left the dockyard. It isn't until Marlowe and his crew is halfway to Singapore until they discover the horror the rats have left behind.

About the author

Joseph Conrad is recognized as one of the 20th century's greatest English language novelists. He was born Jozef Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowski on December 3, 1857, in the Polish Ukraine. His father, a writer and translator, was from Polish nobility, but political activity against Russian oppression led to his exile. Conrad was orphaned at a young age and subsequently raised by his uncle. At 17 he went to sea, an experience that shaped the bleak view of human nature which he expressed in his fiction. In such works as Lord Jim (1900), Youth (1902), and Nostromo (1904), Conrad depicts individuals thrust by circumstances beyond their control into moral and emotional dilemmas. His novel Heart of Darkness (1902), perhaps his best known and most influential work, narrates a literal journey to the center of the African jungle. This novel inspired the acclaimed motion picture Apocalypse Now. After the publication of his first novel, Almayer's Folly (1895), Conrad gave up the sea. He produced thirteen novels, two volumes of memoirs, and twenty-eight short stories. He died on August 3, 1924, in England.