Prescient and shocking, The Secret Agent is a story of terrorism, espionage and revolutionary groups in nineteenth-century London. Quiet shop owner Verloc is a member of an anarchist group, and a secret agent for a foreign country, who becomes involved in a plot to blow up the Greenwich Observatory, with tragic consequences.

Inspired by the real-life Greenwich bomb of 1894, The Secret Agent is a masterpiece of failed lives and complex moral dilemmas.