Lord Jim

Joseph Conrad

July 2013 · Sold by Harper Collins

About this eBook

Courage and cowardice are seen through the eyes of Jim, a young British seaman left to take the blame for the abandonment at sea of a group of pilgrims bound for Mecca to make their hajj. When the ship Patna starts to take on water, the crew abandons both the ship and its passengers, only to discover later that the Patna and the pilgrims had also been saved. The crew evades justice, with the exception of Jim, who alone must face a judicial inquiry and bear the burden of its judgment.

Told through a series of stories by and to Charles Marlow, the narrator from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Jim’s tortured life is pieced together—exploring the consequences and difficulties of a life spent at sea.

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About the author

Polish author Joseph Conrad is considered to be one of the greatest English-language novelists, a remarkable achievement considering English was not his first language. Conrad’s literary works often featured a nautical setting, reflecting the influences of his early career in the Merchant Navy, and his depictions of the struggles of the human spirit in a cold, indifferent world are best exemplified in such seminal works as Heart of Darkness, Lord JimM, The Secret Agent, Nostromo, and Typhoon. Regarded as a forerunner of modernist literature, Conrad’s writing style and characters have influenced such distinguished writers as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William S. Burroughs, Hunter S. Thompson, and George Orwell, among many others. Many of Conrad’s novels have been adapted for film, most notably Heart of Darkness, which served as the inspiration and foundation for Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 film Apocalypse Now.