Graham Greene

The last priest in a poor section of North Mexico where the Red Shirts have outlawed God finds himself a hero despite himself.

"I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused," Graham Greene's narrator Fowler remarks of Alden Pyle, the eponymous "Quiet American" of what is perhaps the most controversial novel of his career. Pyle is the brash young idealist sent out by Washington on a mysterious mission to Saigon, where the French Army struggles against the Vietminh guerrillas. As young Pyle's well-intentioned policies blunder into bloodshed, Fowler,...

"Three men, Brown, Smith, and Jones, meet on a ship bound for Haiti, where "Papa Doc" and the Tontons Macoute rule, with sinister secret police."

Follows the plight of Wormold, a former vacuum cleaner salesman, who becomes a slave to the expensive whims of his thirteen-year-old daughter, Milly, and takes on a job for MI6 as Secret Agent 5920015 to pay for them.

"I met Aunt Augusta for the first time at my mother's funeral..." Described by Graham Greene as "the only book I have written just for the fun of it," Travels with My Aunt is the story of Hanry Pulling, a retired and complacent bank manager who meets his septuagenarian Aunt Augusta for the first time at what he supposes to be his mother's funeral. She soon persuades Henry to abandon his dull suburban existence to travel her way-winding through Brighton,...

The British author embarks on an awe-inspiring trek through 1930s West Africa in “one of the best travel books [of the twentieth] century” (The Independent).
 
When Graham Greene left Liverpool in 1935 for what was then an Africa unmarked by colonization, it was to leave the known transgressions of his own civilization behind for those unknown. First by cargo ship, then by train...

Querry, a world-famous architect, is the victim of an attack of indifference, no longer finding meaning in art or 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...

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...

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...

These wide-ranging tales of menace, tragedy, and comedy offer ample proof that “in the short story, as well as the novel, Graham Greene is the master” (The New York Times).
 
Written between 1929 and 1954, here are twenty-one stories by a “master storyteller” (Newsweek). Whatever the crime, whatever the pursuit, whatever the mood—from the tragic and horrifying to the ribald...