New Releases by Graham Greene

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 had been under investigation for racketeering. That raises questions some questions for Martins, so he starts combing the postwar ruins of the Austrian capital to find out for himself what happened to Harry Lime . . . The Third Man is one of the best-known works by Graham Greene, author of The Quiet American, Our Man in Havana, and The End of the Affair—famed for his complex, philosophical novels, and compelling tales of crime, espionage, and suspense. “The most ingenious, inventive and exciting of our novelists . . . A master of storytelling.” —V. S. Pritchett, The Times (London) “Greene had wit and grace . . . and a transcendent universal compassion that places him for all time in the ranks of world literature.” —John LeCarre “In a class by himself.” —William Golding An enormously popular writer who was also one of the most significant novelists of his time.” —Newsweek

This eyewitness account of religious and political persecution in 1930s Mexico inspired the British novelist’s “masterpiece,” The Power and the Glory (John Updike). In 1938, Graham Greene, a burgeoning convert to Roman Catholicism, was commissioned to expose the anticlerical purges in Mexico by President Plutarco Elías Calles. Churches had been destroyed, peasants held secret masses in their homes, religious icons were banned, and priests disappeared. Traveling under the growing clouds of fascism, Greene was anxious to see for himself the effect it had on the people—what he found was a combination of despair, resignation, and fierce resilience. Journeying through the rugged and remote terrain of Chiapas and Tabasco, Greene’s emotional, gut response to the landscape, the sights and sounds, the fears, the oppressive heat, and the state of mind under “the fiercest persecution of religion anywhere since the reign of Elizabeth” makes for a vivid and candid account, and stands alone as a “singularly beautiful travel book” (New Statesman). Hailed by William Golding as “the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man’s consciousness and anxiety,” Greene would draw on the experiences of The Lawless Roads for one of his greatest novels, The Power and the Glory.

A gang war is raging through the dark underworld of Brighton. Seventeen-year-old Pinkie, malign and ruthless, has killed a man. Believing he can escape retribution, he is unprepared for the courageous, life-embracing Ida Arnold. Graham Greene''s gripping thriller was adapted into a British film noir in 1947 starring Richard Attenborough as the razor-wielding Pinkie.

In Greene’s “magnificent tour-de-force among tales of international intrigue,” rival agents engage in a deadly game of cat and mouse in prewar England (The New York Times). D., a widowed professor of Romance literature, has arrived in Dover on a peaceful yet important mission. He’s to negotiate a contract to buy coal for his country, one torn by civil war. With it, there’s a chance to defeat fascist influences. Without it, the loyalists will fail. When D. strikes up a romantic acquaintance with the estranged but solicitous daughter of a powerful coal-mining magnate, everything appears to be in his favor—if not for a counteragent who has come to England with the intent of sabotaging every move he makes. Accused of forgery and theft, and roped into a charge of murder, D. becomes a hunted man, hemmed in at every turn by an ever-tightening net of intrigue and double cross, with no one left to trust but himself. Written during the height of the Spanish Civil War, Graham Greene’s “exciting . . . kaleidoscopic affair” was the basis for the classic 1945 thriller starring Charles Boyer and Lauren Bacall (The Sunday Times).

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 on a dangerous and unpredictable 350-mile, four-week trek through Liberia with his cousin, and a handful of servants and bearers, into a world where few had ever seen a white man. For Greene, this odyssey became as much a trip into the primitive interiors of the writer himself as it was a physical journey into a land foreign to his experience. “No one who reads this book will question the value of Greene’s experiment, or emerge unshaken by the penetration, the richness, the integrity of this moving record.” —The Guardian

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 girl on her last legs; a boozy and spiteful journalist who’s found an unrequited love in her paid companion, and her latest scoop in second class—a Serbian dissident in disguise on his way to lead a revolution; and a murderer on the run looking for a getaway. As the train hurtles across Europe, the fates of everyone on board will collide long before the Orient Express rushes headlong to its final destination. Originally published in the UK as Stamboul Train in 1932, Graham Greene’s “novel has movement, variety, interest; taken on the surface, it is an interesting and entertaining story of adventure, penetrated through and through with the consciousness of the on-rushing train, with that curious sense of the temporary suspension of one’s ordinary existence which comes to many on ship or train” (The New York Times).

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 guests on his private yacht and sail down the coast of Italy. It sounds too lovely to be true. And surely Bertram can afford one night at the Hôtel de Paris. But when the absentminded Dreuther fails to show, and days turn into weeks, Bertram and Cary find themselves well beyond their means. Unable to check out, trapped in luxury, and with nowhere to turn but the casino, Bertram has a plan—and absolutely no idea what there is left to lose.

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 ship, Medea: a well-meaning pair of Americans claiming to bring vegetarianism to the natives; a former jungle fighter in World War II Burma and current confidence man; and an English hotelier returning home to the Trianon, an unsalable shell of an establishment on the hills above the capital. Each is embroiled in a charade. But when they’re unsuspectingly bound together in this nightmare republic of squalid poverty, torrid love affairs, and impending violence, their masks will be stripped away. “While Mr. Greene . . . specialized in chronicling the moral and political murkiness he encountered in the third world . . . nowhere did he produce a more topical or damning work of fiction than [in The Comedians]” (The New York Times). Banned in Haiti, and condemned by Papa Doc Duvalier, it was adapted by Greene into a 1967 film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.

A famous architect struggling with a crisis of faith escapes to a leper colony in the Congo, in Graham Greene’s “greatest novel” (Time). Querry is a world-renowned architect noted for his magnificent churches, each designed not for the glory of God, but for the satisfaction of self. Suddenly infected with indifference, he has abandoned his pursuit of pleasure. Now he has reached the end of desire at the end of the world—a colony of lepers in the remote jungles of Africa. Here, under the guidance of Doctor Colin, a fellow atheist, Querry’s consideration of the sick could be something close to a cure for his own suffering. So too, it first seems, could a local plantation owner’s lonely and abused wife—Querry’s unlikely confessor. But when Querry reluctantly agrees to build a hospital and his good intentions brand him a modern-day saint, all the intrusive and dangerous piety of civilization returns. And this time it could be inescapable. From “the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man’s consciousness and anxiety” comes Graham Greene’s celebrated novel about the consequences of conviction, the sickness of the soul, and the tenuous endurance of the human spirit (William Golding).

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 gangsters whose sleazy little rackets have most recently erupted in the murder of an informant. Pinkie’s attempts to cover their tracks have led him into the bed of a timid and lovestruck young waitress named Rose—his new wife, the key witness to his crimes, and, should she live long enough, his alibi. But loitering in the shadows is another woman, Ida Arnold—an avenging angel determined to do right by Pinkie’s latest victim. Adapted for film in both 1948 and 2010 and for the stage as both a drama and musical, and serving as an inspiration to such disparate artists as Morrissey, John Barry, and Queen, “this bleak, seething and anarchic novel still resonate[s]” (The Guardian).

Pinkie Brown, jeune bandit de dix-sept ans à la cruauté sadique et au charme envoûtant, est prêt à tout pour venger le meurtre de Kite, le chef de son gang... y compris à épouser Rose, serveuse naïve et sans grâce. Son but est d''empêcher la jeune fille de témoigner contre lui dans l''affaire de la disparition d''un journaliste soupçonné d''avoir assassiné Kite. Lorsque Ida Arnold, séduite par le journaliste juste avant sa disparition, décide de stopper les agissements meurtriers de Pinkie, une course contre la montre s''engage. Entre les personnages hauts en couleur qui dominent l''histoire se joue un drame de vengeance, de férocité et de mort. Graham Greene a toujours avoué son penchant pour ce roman paru en 1938, mi-thriller, mi-fable morale, qu''il considérait comme l''un de ses meilleurs. " L''énergie et la puissance de Pinkie Brown, adolescent rebelle, ne faiblissent pas avec les années. " The Guardian

Maurice Castle is a high-level operative in the British secret service during the Cold War. He is deeply in love with his African wife, who escaped apartheid South Africa with the help of his communist friend. Despite his misgivings, Castle decides to act as a double agent, passing information to the Soviets to help his in-laws in South Africa. In order to evade detection, he allows his assistant to be wrongly identified as the source of the leaks. But when suspicions remain, Castle is forced to make an even more excruciating sacrifice to save himself. Originally published in 1978, The Human Factor is an exciting novel of espionage drawn from Greene’s own experiences in MI6 during World War II, and ultimately a deeply humanistic examination of the very nature of loyalty. This edition features a new introduction by Colm Tóibín. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Meticulously chosen and engagingly annotated, this selection of letters many of them seen here for the first time gives an entirely new perspective on a life that combined literary achievement, political action, espionage, exotic travel and romantic entanglement. In several letters, the individuals, events or places described provide the inspiration for characters, episodes or locations found in his later fiction. The correspondence describes his travels in Mexico, Africa, Malaya, Vietnam, Haiti, Cuba, Sierra Leone, Liberia and other trouble spots, where he observed the struggles of victims and victors with a compassionate and truthful eye. The volume includes a vast number of unpublished letters to authors Evelyn Waugh, Auberon Waugh, Anthony Powell, Edith Sitwell, R.K. Narayan and Muriel Spark, and to other more notorious individuals such as the double-agent Kim Philby.

When Graham Greene died in 1991, at the age of 86, his reputation as a great Catholic writer was assured. His books reflected an awareness of sin and confronted discomfiting themes with a sombre eye. The British Catholic journal The Tablet provided Greene with a forum for both his works-in-progress and his sometimes unorthodox religious views. For the first time, Graham Greenes Tablet contributions are collected in one volume. Much of the journalism has not been seen for fifty years.

A collection of ten stories, the first written in 1923 and the last in 1988. These will be arranged in chronological order reversed and there will be a short preface by the author. These stories have been previously published in a selection of magazines and newspapers (the two most recently in the ''Independent'').

A collection of four stories comprising ` Under The Garden'' (A short novel); `A Visit to the Morin''; Dream of a Strange Land'' and `A Discovery in the Woods''. In these four stories Graham Greene, one of the master of modern English fiction, has allowed himself the liberty of fantasy, myth, legend and dream. The results are, quite simply, superb.

Doctor Fischer despises the human race. When the notorious toothpaste millionaire decides to hold the last of his famous parties his own deadly version of the Book of Revelations Greene opens up a powerful vision of the limitless greed of the rich. Bl

Graham Greene(1904-1991) es uno de los grandes creadores del thriller y en su obra está el germen de todos las derivaciones que posteriormente ha tomado el género. Entre sus obras más exitosas se cuentan Nuestro hombre en La Habana, El factor humano, El americano impasible, El poder y la gloria, El tercer hombre o El cónsul honorario.

Graham Greene (1904-1991) n''est pas seulement le grand écrivain catholique consacré par le succès de son fameux roman La Puissance et la gloire. Entré par effraction dans le royaume de la Grâce (selon le mot de François Mauriac), cet ancien membre du Foreign Office a su, même au travers des divertissements que sont des livres comme Notre agent à La Havane et Un Américain bien tranquille, dénoncer la guerre, les dictatures et ce vice suprême : l''imbécillité. Voilà pourquoi Graham Greene compte, avec George Orwell et Evelyn Waugh, parmi les géants de la littérature anglaise du XXe siècle.

The Third Man is Greene''s brilliant recreation of post-war Vienna, a city of desolate poverty occupied by four powers. Rollo Martins, a second-rate novelist, arrives penniless in Vienna to visit his old friend and hero Harry Lime. Harry is dead, but the circumstances surrounding his death are highly suspicious, and his reputation, at the very least, dubious. Graham Greene said of The Third Man that he "wanted to entertain [people], to frighten them a little, to make them laugh" and the result is both a compelling narrative and a haunting thriller. The Fallen Idol is the chilling story of a small boy caught up in the games that adults play. Left in the care of the butler, Baines, and his wife, Philip realizes too late the danger of lies and deceit. But the truth is even deadlier. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

From master storyteller Graham Greene comes the tale of Anthony Farrant, who has boasted, lied and cheated his way through jobs all over the world. Then his adoring twin sister, Kate, gets him taken on as the bodyguard of Krogh, her lover and boss, a megalomaniac Swedish financier. All goes well until Krogh gives orders that offend Anthony''s innate decency. Outraged and blind to risk, he leaks information to Minty, a shabby journalist and fellow victim of life, a decision that will lead to disastrous consequences. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

During World War II a group of men is held prisoner by the Germans, who determine that three of them must die. This is the story of how one of those men trades his wealth for his life--and lives to pay for his act in utterly unexpected ways.

A short novel about a group of Dr. Fischer''s guests who risk death to receive one of his extravagant gifts.

When Father Quixote, a local priest of the Spanish village of El Toboso who claims ancestry to Cervantes? fictional Don Quixote, is elevated to the rank of monsignor through a clerical error, he sets out on a journey to Madrid to purchase purple socks appropriate to his new station. Accompanying him on his mission is his best friend, Sancho, the Communist ex-mayor of the village who argues politics and religion with Quixote and rescues him from the various troubles his innocence lands him in along the way.

With superb skill and feeling, Graham greene retraces the experiences and encounters of a long and extraordinary life. His restlessness is legendary; he has travelled like an explorer seeking our people and political situations. ''at the dangerous edge of things'' - Haiti during the nightmare rule of Papa Doc, Vietnam in the last days - of the French. , Cuba, Prague, Paraguay, Kenya during the Mau Mau rebellion. With ironic delight he recalls his time in the British Secret Service in Africa, and his brief involvement in Hollywood. He writes, as only he can about people and places, about faith, doubt, fear and, not least, the trials and craft of writing.