Joseph Conrad combines three elements in his writing: compelling plots, evocative writing and dark subtexts. His settings are wonderful - African river banks redolent with freshwater mud in stifling humidity, Malay islands lush and forbidding, and the constant moral challenge of the high seas. His protagonists are rich and flawed and invariably surrounded by characters just as interesting. The drama is always perfectly pitched - races against time, ambitious deceptions, failures not yet realised. And his themes are fascinating and pessimistic - vanity, deception, weakness, temper. But what sets him apart for me is the precision of his writing. In his best stories he doesn't waste a single word while perfectly evoking scene and action, "Then, on a fine moonlight night, all the rats left the ship."

There are a few of his lesser stories in this collection, but it's a good enough place to start. "Youth" is a masterpiece, "Karain: a memory" is evocative of a time forever gone and "The Secret Sharer" is utterly compelling. ( )

My early encounters with Conrad left me ambivalent: I didn't get what all the fuss about The Heart of Darkness was for and I found The Secret Sharer moderately good but not thrilling.

I got this collection many years later as a way of trying to decide whether to bother with Conrad in a serious way and I found that the quality trended upward as the volume progresses - and since the stories are in chronological order of writing I suppose Conrad improved with practice. Over-all, I concluded I was sufficiently interested to try one of the novels.

The stories here almost all adopt Conrad's trademark framed narrative style, which seems to sometimes benefit the story and other times subtract from the immediacy of the telling without adding anything worthwhile. Again, mastery of this approach improved with time.

Genre is all over the place in this book (which is fun): we have Stephenson-esque Pacific tales, a Hardy-like pastoral romance, a reminiscent of Tolstoy story of Polish history and the sort of political-criminal-conspiracy thriller adopted by a zillion thriller writers. Never-the-less, they are all also eminently Conradian - and The Secret Sharer, upon re-reading, I find is actually really tense as well as an interesting moral poser. ( )