CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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Biography: Joseph Conrad
Enlightening overview of a literary pioneer
SPOOKY: Russian spy Verloc (Toby Jones, right) is instructed by Vladimir (David Dawson) to blow up the Greenwich Observatory in 2016 BBC production of The Secret Agent
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip
IN A Penguin readers’ list of the 100 must-read classic novels, Joseph Conrad appears only once, at number 92.
Unsurprisingly, the named work is his short novella Heart of Darkness, often found on college syllabuses and the subject of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 blockbuster film, Apocalypse Now, which relocated the action from the menacing hinterland of the turn-of-the-century Congo to the US genocide in Vietnam.
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GORDON PARSONS is intrigued by a biography of the Marxist intellectual and author, made from the point of view of his son
JULIA THOMAS unpicks the mental processes that explain why book-to-film adaptations so often disappoint
On the centenary of the birth of the anti-colonial thinker and activist Frantz Fanon, JENNY FARRELL assesses his enduring influence
MANJEET RIDON relishes a novel that explores the guilty repressions – and sexual awakenings – of a post-war Dutch bourgeois family