Nostromo

In the fictional South American republic of Costaguana, the isolated port-province of Sulaco is dominated by one thing: the San Tomé silver mine, revived by the Englishman Charles Gould into the richest mine on the continent. The silver draws foreign capital, props up governments, and pays for the soldiers who topple them — and Gould has staked his soul on the belief that it can bring law and order to a country drowning in coups and misrule.

When yet another revolution closes on Sulaco, Gould resolves that a great shipment of silver must not fall into rebel hands. The task falls to Nostromo — Gian’ Battista Fidanza, the magnificent Italian foreman of the dock-workers, the man everyone trusts absolutely and who lives to be thought incorruptible. With the disillusioned journalist Martin Decoud, he rows the treasure out into the black waters of the gulf by night. What happens to the silver, and to Nostromo’s idea of himself, becomes the dark core of the book.

Conrad tells the story not in order but in great loops through time and through a dozen minds, building an entire imagined country — its history, its factions, its families — around a single vein of metal. Beneath the revolution lies his unsparing study of “material interests”: of how wealth, draped in the language of progress, corrupts every ideal and every man it touches. Widely ranked among the greatest novels of the twentieth century, Nostromo is the fullest expression of Conrad’s political and moral imagination.

This edition presents the complete public-domain text of the 1904 novel in clean, readable typesetting prepared for the modern e-reader, with an editor’s foreword on the book’s composition and lasting power, a biographical note on Joseph Conrad, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.