The Secret Agent – Joseph Conrad

"The terrorist and the policeman both come from the same basket."

Verloc is a shopkeeper in London who sells pornography and doubles as a spy for a foreign embassy. He is ordered to commit an act of terrorism to provoke a crackdown on anarchists. His clumsy attempt to blow up the Greenwich Observatory goes horribly wrong, destroying his family and exposing the seedy, morally bankrupt world of espionage.

Conrad's novel is a chillingly modern examination of terrorism. It strips away the glamour of the spy genre to reveal a world of incompetence, betrayal, and the banality of evil.