Collected Novels of Graham Greene

Graham Greene's extraordinary reputation rests largely on these three superb novels, all of which have been adapted into classic films. Brighton Rock: Seventeen-year-old Pinkie Brown, raised in the prewar Brighton slums, leads a motley pack of gangsters whose small-time scams have erupted in murder. The cover-up leads Pinkie to a timid and love-struck young waitress-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-one determined to avenge Pinkie's latest victim.

This collection features three classic novels that explore Graham Greene's most important themes: Catholicism, international intrigue, and the never-ending struggle to know oneself. The Heart of the Matter: In a British colony of West Africa, Henry Scobie is a pious man of modest means charged with securing borders. But when he's passed over for a promotion, the humiliation hits hard-for his wife. To make it up to her, Henry accepts a loan from a black marketeer to secure Louise's passage out of Africa. His single indiscretion quickly leads him-one moral compromise after another-into a web of blackmail, adultery, and murder. The Quiet American: Vietnam, 1955. British journalist Thomas Fowler is covering the insurgency against French colonial rule and doing what he can to protect his Vietnamese lover, Phuong. Alden Pyle of the CIA believes in bringing American democracy to Vietnam by any means necessary. But when his ideas of conquest come to include Phuong, pride, passion, and blind moral conviction collide with terrible consequences. The Power and the Glory: In 1930s Tabasco, Mexico, Catholicism is being outlawed. As churches are razed and devotees are executed, a member of the clergy known only as the "whisky priest" flees. He now travels as one of the hunted-attending, in secret, to the spiritual needs of the faithful. When a peasant begs him to return to Tabasco to hear the confessions of a dying man, the whisky priest knows it's a trap. But it's also his duty-and possibly his salvation.

Orient Express: The Orient Express has embarked on a three-day journey from Ostend 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. It's a Battlefield: In pre–World War II London, during a demonstration in Hyde Park, Communist bus driver Jim Drover acts on instinct to protect his wife by stabbing to death the policeman set to strike her down. Sentenced to hang-whether as a martyr, tool, or murderer-Drover accepts his lot, unaware that the ramifications of the crime, and the battle for his reprieve, are inflaming political unrest. But Drover's single, impulsive act is also upending the lives of the people he loves and trusts. Caught in a quicksand of desperation, sexual betrayal, and guilt, they will not only play a part in Drover's fate, they'll become agents-both unwitting and calculated-of their own fates as well. A Gun for Sale: Born out of a brutal childhood, Raven is an assassin for hire whose latest hit-a government minister-is 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 Raven's got an advantage. Crossing paths with a sympathetic dancer named Anne Crowder, the emotionally scarred Raven has found someone in the wreckage of his life he can trust, maybe his only hope for salvation. Or at least, escape-because Anne is also Mather's fiancée. Now the fate of two men will depend on her. And either way, it's betrayal.

Travels with my Aunt: Now that dullish London bank manager Henry Pulling has retired with an agreeable pension, he plans to spend more time weeding his dahlias. Then, for the first time in fifty years, he sees his aunt Augusta at his mother's funeral. Charging into her seventies with florid abandon, Augusta insists that Henry abandon his garden, follow her, and hold on tight. She whisks her nephew out of Brighton and onto the Orient Express bound for Paris and Istanbul, then on to Paraguay, and down the rabbit hole of her past, which swarms with swindlers, smugglers, war criminals, and rather unconventional lovers. With each new stop, Henry discovers not only more about his aunt and her secrets but also about himself. The Confidential Agent: In prewar England, D., a professor of Romance literature, has arrived in Dover on an important mission 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 romance 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. The Ministry of Fear: On a peaceful Sunday afternoon, Arthur Rowe comes upon a charity fete where he wins a game of chance. If only this were an ordinary day. Britain is under threat by Germany, and the air raid sirens that bring the bazaar to a halt expose Rowe as no ordinary man. Recently released from a psychiatric prison for the mercy killing of his wife, he is burdened by guilt, and now, in possession of a seemingly innocuous prize, on the run from Nazi spies who want him dead. Pursued on a dark odyssey through the bombed-out streets of London, there isn't a soul he can trust, not even himself. Because amnesiac Arthur Rowe doesn't even know who he really is.

A Burnt-Out Case: Querry, a world-renowned architect noted for his magnificent churches, is suffering a crisis of faith that's led him to what seems like the end of the world: a colony of lepers in the Congo. 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 spiritual malaise. 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. The Captain and the Enemy: 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 from the boy's diabolical father. Settling into a new life in a dire London flat, Victor becomes the willing ward of his mysterious abductor and the tender and childless Liza. He quickly adapts to the only family he's ever known, despite the Captain's long disappearances on suspicious "adventures" and a guarded curiosity about this peculiar but devoted couple. Then one day, in pursuit of answers, and perhaps an adventure of his own, Victor responds to an entreaty from the Captain to come to Panama. What follows in this world of dangerous imposture is absolutely revelatory. The Comedians: 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, their lonely wives-, and a small group of enterprising strangers arriving in Port-au-Prince. A well-meaning American couple claiming to bring vegetarianism to the natives; a former 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. The Nation the Man Within: In Greene's debut novel, Francis Andrews is a reluctant smuggler living in the shadow of his brutish father's legacy. To exorcise the ghosts of the man he loathes, Andrews betrays his colleagues to authorities and takes flight across the downs. He stumbles upon the isolated cottage of a beguiling stranger named Elizabeth, an empathetic young woman who is just as lonely, every bit the outsider as he, and reconciling a troubling past of her own. On the run from those he exposed, Andrews believes he's found refuge and salvation. But when Elizabeth encourages him to return to the courts of Lewes and give evidence against his accomplices, the treacherous and deadly repercussions may be beyond their control.