Graham Greene

Strangers in Port-au-Prince are united in the corruption, fear, and revolt of Duvalier-era Haiti in "the most interesting novel of [Greene's] career" ( The Nation ). Haiti, under the rule of Papa Doc and his menacing paramilitary, the Tontons Macoute, has long been abandoned by tourists. Now it is home to corrupt capitalists, foreign ambassadors and their lonely wives -- and a small group of enterprising strangers rocking into port on the Dutch cargo...

A teenage sociopath rises to power in Britain’s criminal underworld in this “brilliant and uncompromising” thriller (The New York Times).
 
Seventeen-year-old Pinkie Brown, raised amid the casual violence and corruption in the dire prewar Brighton slums, has left his final judgment in the hands of God. On the streets, impelled by his own twisted moral doctrine, he leads a motley pack of...

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.

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 and truck through Sierra Leone, and finally on foot, Greene embarked...

This noir classic by the "superb storyteller" is the basis for the movie named the best British film of all time by the British Film Institute (The New York Times).   Almost-broke pulp author Rollo Martins sets out for Vienna after receiving an invitation from his old friend Harry Lime, who might have a financial opportunity for him. But when he arrives, he's shocked to learn that Lime is dead in what appeared to be an accident-and that his pal...

In postwar London, a boy is drawn into a labyrinth of personal betrayals, intrigue, love, and revolution: "In short, a tremendous yarn" (Paul Theroux). On his twelfth birthday, Victor Baxter is spirited away from boarding school by a stranger known only as the Captain who claims to have won him in a backgammon game with the boy's diabolical father. Settling into a new life in a dire London flat, Victor becomes the willing ward of his mysterious abductor...

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 moodfrom the tragic and horrifying to the ribald and bittersweet, Graham Greene is the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century...

In what Greene calls My Own World-as opposed to the Common World of shared reality-he accompanies Henry James on a disagreeable riverboat trip to Bogota, is caught in a guerilla crossfire with Evelyn Waugh and W. H. Auden, strolls in the Vatican garden with Pope John Paul II who's doling out Perugina chocolates like hosts, offers refuge to a suicidal Charlie Chaplin, and stages a disastrous play in blank verse for Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton....

A Monte Carlo honeymoon becomes a gamble in Graham Greene's "superbly well told" comedy of love, marriage, and risk (J. B. Priestley). A modest London accountant on a budget, Mr. Bertram has settled on a honeymoon at the seaside resort of Bournemouth with his fiancée, Cary. However, Bertram's boss, the solicitous Herbert Dreuther, won't hear of anything so common. Bertram and Cary are to be married in Monte Carlo, after which they'll be Dreuther's...

A detective and a chorus girl stalk the shadows of a murderer in this thriller from "a pioneer of the modern mood we now think of as noir" ( LA Weekly ). Born out of a brutal childhood, Raven is an assassin for hire whose latest hit -- a government minister -- is one calculated to ignite a war. When the most wanted man in England is paid off in marked bills, he also becomes the easiest to track -- and police detective Jimmy Mather has the lead. But...