Graham Greene Books In Order

The Man Within

Graham Greene’s first published novel represented for the author ‘one sentimental gesture towards his own past, the period of ambition and hope.’ It tells the story of Andrews, a young man who has betrayed his fellow smugglers and fears their vengeance. The Man Within offers a foretaste of Greene s recurring theme of religion and the individual s struggles against cynicism and the indifferent forces of a hostile world.

Orient Express / Stamboul Train

A gripping spy thriller that unfolds aboard the majestic Orient Express as it crosses Europe from Ostend to Constantinople. Weaving a web of subterfuge, murder and politics along the way, the novel focuses upon the disturbing relationship between Myatt, the pragmatic Jew, and naive chorus girl Coral Musker as they engage in a desperate, angst ridden pas de deux before a chilling turn of events spells an end to an unlikely interlude. Exploring the many shades of despair and hope, innocence and duplicity, the book offers a poignant testimony to Greene’s extraordinary powers of insight into the human condition.

England Made Me / The Shipwrecked

Anthony Farrant has boasted, lied and cheated his way through jobs all over the world. Then his 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.

A Gun for Sale / This Gun for Hire

Raven is an ugly man dedicated to ugly deeds. His cold blooded killing of a European Minister of War is an act of violence with chilling repercussions, not just for Raven himself but for the nation as a whole. The money he receives in payment for the murder is made up of stolen notes. When the first of these is traced, Raven is a man on the run. As he tracks down the agent who has been double crossing him and attempts to elude the police, he becomes both hunter and hunted: an unwitting weapon of a strange kind of social justice.

Brighton Rock

Originally published in 1938, Graham Greene’s chilling expose of violence and gang warfare is a masterpiece of psychological realism and often considered Graham Greene’s best novel. It is a fascinating study of evil, sin, and the ”appalling strangeness of the mercy of God,” a classic of its kind. Set in Brighton, England, among the criminal rabble, the book depicts the tragic career of a seventeen year old boy named Pinkie whose primary ambition is to lead a gang to rival that of the wealthy and established Colleoni. Pinkie is devoid of compassion or human feeling, despising weakness of the spirit or of the flesh. Responsible for the razor slashes that killed Kite and also for the death of Hale, he is the embodiment of calculated evil. As a Catholic, however, he is convinced that his retribution does not lie in human hands. He is therefore not prepared for Ida Arnold, Hale’s avenging angel. Ida, whose allegiance is with life, the here and now, has her own ideas about the circumstances surrounding Hale’s death. For the sheer joy of it she takes up the challenge of bringing the infernal Pinkie to an earthly kind of justice. When finished, the listener is sure to ponder some lofty moral issues to which Greene, a Catholic writer, withholds easy judgments.

The Power and the Glory / The Labyrinthine Ways

In a poor, remote section of southern Mexico, the Red Shirts have taken control. God has been outlawed, and the priests have been systematically hunted down and killed. Now, the last priest strives to overcome physical and moral cowardice in order to find redemption.

Graham Greene explores corruption and atonement in this penetrating novel set in 1930s Mexico during the era of Communist religious persecutions. As revolutionaries determine to stamp out the evils of the church through violence, the last Roman Catholic priest is on the lam, hunted by a police lieutenant. Despite his own sense of worthlessness — he is a heavy drinker and has fathered an illegitimate child — he is determined to continue to function as a priest until captured. He is contrasted with Padre Jose, a priest who has accepted marriage and embodies humiliation.

A Christian parable pitting God and religion against twentieth-century materialism, The Power and the Glory is considered by many, including the author himself, to be Greene’s best work.

The Ministry of Fear

For Arthur Rowe, the trip to the charity fete was a joyful step back into adolescence, a chance to forget the nightmare of the blitz and the aching guilt of having mercifully murdered his sick wife. He was surviving alone, aside from the war, until he happened to guess both the true and the false weight of the cake. From that moment, he finds himself ruthlessly hunted, the quarry of malign and shadowy forces, from which he endeavors to escape with a mind that remains obstinately out of focus.

The Heart of the Matter

In this widely acclaimed modern classic, Graham Greene delves deep into character to tell the dramatic, suspenseful story of a good man’s conflict between passion and faith. The Heart of the Matter is one of Graham Greene’s most enduring and tragic novels.

A police commissioner in a British-governed, war-torn West African state, Scobie is bound by the strictest integrity and sense of duty both for his colonial responsibilities and for his wife, whom he deeply pities but no longer loves. Passed over for a promotion, he is forced to borrow money in order to send his despairing wife away on a holiday. When in her absence he develops a passion for a young widow, the scrupulously honest Catholic finds himself giving way to deceit and dishonor. Enmeshed in love and intrigue, he will betray everything he believes in, with tragic consequences.

The Third Man

The Third Man is one of the truly great post war films, the Oscar winner starring Orson Welles and Joseph Cotton. This complete novella is the original basis for that film. The story centers on a pulp fiction writer who is searching for an old friend in post World War II Vienna. When he discovers that his friend died under suspicious circumstances, he becomes inextricably involved in the mystery. Graham Greene, recognized as one of the most important writers of this century, brings the listener face to face with fundamental questions of morality and personal loyalty. Martin Jarvis truly demonstrates his vocal virtuosity as he captures Greene’s taut dialogue, minimalist characterizations, and international cast. 2 cassettes.

The End of the Affair

The novelist Maurice Bendrix’s love affair with his friend’s wife, Sarah, had begun in London during the Blitz. One day, inexplicably and without warning, Sarah had broken off the relationship. It seemed impossible that there could be a rival for her heart. Yet two years later, driven by obsessive jealousy and grief, Bendrix sends Pakris, a private detective, to follow Sarah and find out the truth.’One of the most true and moving novels of my time, in anybody’s language.’ William Faulkner’Singularly moving and beautiful.’ Evelyn Waugh

The Quiet American

While the French Army in Indo China is grappling with the Vietminh, back in Saigon a young and high minded American named Pyle begins to channel economic aid to a ‘Third Force.’ Caught between French colonialists and the Vietminh, Fowler, the narrator and seasoned foreign correspondent, observes: ‘I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.’ As young Pyle’s policies blunder on into bloodshed, the older man finds it impossible to stand aside as an observer. But Fowler’s motives for intervening are suspect, both to the police and to himself: for Pyle has robbed him of his Vietnamese mistress. ‘No serious writer of this century has more thoroughly invaded and shaped the public imagination than Graham Greene.’ Time

Loser Takes All

Luck seems to have eluded Betram altogether. He doesn’t even believe in chance. But when his wedding plans are moved to Monte Carlo, he is drawn to the Casino and is seduced by good fortune. A Miramax film starring Robert Lindsay and Molly Ringwald.

Our Man in Havana

In pre Castro Cuba, James Wormold’s wife has left him for another man, leaving him alone with his teenage daughter Milly. Wormold’s career as a vacuum cleaner salesman doesn’t net enough to pay for Milly’s champagne tastes, so when an acquaintance offers him work with the British secret service, he readily accepts. Unfortunately, Wormold has no information to relay to the home office, but he’s not about to let a small matter like that keep him from the gravy train. Undaunted, he creates a vast network of agents, eventually passing off a sketch of a vacuum cleaner’s circuit diagram as a secret military installation. This marvelous coup marks Wormold as a rising star and lands him his very own private secretary. But when people around him start dropping like flies, Wormold realizes that someone is taking his little game very, very seriously. This sparkling spoof is one of Greene’s funniest and most accessible novels.

A Burnt-Out Case

With a new introduction by Giles FodenWhen Querry, a famous architect, no longer finds meaning in art or pleasure in life, he goes to work at a Congo leper village where, as he loses himself in work for the lepers, his disease of mind slowly approaches a cure. Then the white community finds out who Querry is.

The Comedians

Three men meet on a ship bound for Haiti, where corruption and terror reign under the dictatorship of Papa Doc and the Tontons Macoute, his sinister secret police. Disillusioned and noncommittal, they are the ”comedians” of Greene’s title. Brown is a disenchanted English hotel owner; the Smiths are an American couple on a goodwill mission; Martha is the young wife of a Latin American diplomat; Jones is an engaging fool. They play their parts, respectable or shady, in the foreground, experiencing love affairs rather than love, enthusiasms but not a faith, and meaningless accidental deaths. Hiding behind their actors’ masks, they hesitate on the edge of life, afraid of love, pain, and fear itself. With alternating comedy, irony, and grim violence, Greene weaves these lives in a pattern of mounting suspense.

Travels with My Aunt

Starring Dame Hilda Bracket as Aunt Augusta, this is a Radio 4 dramatization of Graham Greene’s novel in which a retired bank manager accompanies his aunt to exotic parts of the world. Henry is introduced to the wilder shores of life, and a morality far beyond his own narrow suburban experience.

The Honorary Consul

Set in a provincial Argentinean town, The Honorary Consul takes place in that bleak country of exhausted passion, betrayal, and absurd hope that Graham Greene has explored so precisely in such novels as The Power and the Glory and The Comedians. On the far side of the great, muddy river that separates the two countries lies Paraguay, a brutal dictatorship shaken by sporadic revolutionary activity; on the near side, a torpid city whose only visible cultural institution is a brothel. The foreigners of the city are refugees, each washed up on the banks of the Paran by some inner disaster or defeat: Dr. Eduardo Plarr, a physician, whose English father has vanished into a Paraguayan prison, and for whom ‘caring is the only dangerous thing’; Humphries, a teacher of English, who has touched bottom and accepted it; Charley Fortnum, The Honorary Consul, who at the age of sixty one, sustained by drink and his disputed status as British Consul, still retains enough hope and illusion to marry a twenty year old girl from Se ora Sanchez’ brothel…
With gathering force, Graham Greene draws his characters into the political chaos that lies beneath the surface of South American life. Fortnum is kidnapped by Paraguayan revolutionaries who have mistaken him for the American Ambassador. Realizing their error, they threaten to execute him anyway if their demands are not met. Plarr, torn between his instinctive feeling for the revolutionaries one of whom is an old friend and his ambiguous relationship with Fortnum, whose wife he has taken as a lover, becomes involved in a tragicomedy that leads inexorably to a meaningless death. At the center of The Honorary Consul is Plarr, a brilliant Graham Greene creation, perhaps the most moving and convincing figure in his fiction. Plarr is a man so cut off from human feeling, so puzzled by the emotional needs of men like Fortnum, that he is paradoxically vulnerable, chillingly exposed, and required in the end to pay with his life for the illusions that other people believe in and that he himself cannot share. In the men and women who surround Plarr Clara, who has moved from the brothel to Charley Fortnum’s bedroom; Father Rivas, the revolutionary priest who dominates those near him, despite his unsanctified marriage and belief in political terror; Saavedra, the Argentinean novelist, whose work lugubriously mirrors the world around him; Aquino, the poet turned revolutionary; Colonel Perez, the cheerfully efficient chief of police Graham Greene has created a world peculiarly his own. It is a world illuminated by that special passion for the complexities of love, faith, compassion, and betrayal that lies at the very heart of his work.

Third Man

The Third Man is one of the truly great post war films, the Oscar winner starring Orson Welles and Joseph Cotton. This complete novella is the original basis for that film. The story centers on a pulp fiction writer who is searching for an old friend in post World War II Vienna. When he discovers that his friend died under suspicious circumstances, he becomes inextricably involved in the mystery. Graham Greene, recognized as one of the most important writers of this century, brings the listener face to face with fundamental questions of morality and personal loyalty. Martin Jarvis truly demonstrates his vocal virtuosity as he captures Greene’s taut dialogue, minimalist characterizations, and international cast. 2 cassettes.

The Human Factor

Book Jacket Status: JacketedGraham Greene’s passion for moral complexity and his stylistic aplomb were perfectly suited to the cat and mouse game of the spy novel, a genre he practically invented and to which he periodically returned while fashioning one of the twentieth century s longest, most triumphant literary careers. Written late in his life, The Human Factor displays his gift for suspense at its most refined level, and his understanding of the physical and spiritual vulnerability of the individual at its deepest.

Doctor Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party

Mr Jones, a quiet unprepossessing man who works as a translator in a Swiss chocolate factory, meets and falls in love with Anna Luise, many years his junior and the daughter of Doctor Fischer, the notorious toothpaste millionaire.

Monsignor Quixote

A morally complex and mature work from a modern master IN THIS later novel by Graham Greene featuring a new introduction the author continues to explore moral and theological dilemmas through psychologically astute character studies and exciting drama on an international stage. The title character of Monsignor Quixote is a village priest, elevated to the rank of monsignor through a clerical error, who travels to Madrid accompanied by his best friend, Sancho, the Communist ex mayor of the village, in Greene’s lighthearted variation on Cervantes.

Getting to Know the General

In August 1981 my bag was packed for my fifth visit to Panama when the news came to me over the telephone of the death of General Omar Torrijos Herrera, my friend and host…
At that moment the idea came to me to write a short personal memoir…
of a man I had grown to love over those five years’ Getting to Know the General is Graham Greene’s account of a five year personal involvement with Omar Torrijos, ruler of Panama from 1968 81 and Sergeant Chuchu, one of the few men in the National Guard whom the General trusted completely. It is a fascinating tribute to an inspirational politician in the vital period of his country’s history, and to an unusual and enduring friendship.

The Tenth Man

An utterly gripping story of a wealthy French lawyer being held prisoner by the Germans during World War II. The lawyer is chosen by the soldiers to die, but instead he makes a cowardly trade for his life one that he will have to pay for even as a free man .

The Captain and the Enemy

Victor Baxter is a young boy when a secretive stranger known simply as ‘the Captain’ brings him from his boarding school to London. Victor becomes the surrogate son and companion of a woman named Liza, who renames him ‘Jim’ and depends on him for any news about the world outside their door. Raised in these odd yet touching circumstances, Jim is never quite sure of Liza’s relationship to the Captain, who is often away on mysterious errands. It is not until Jim reaches manhood that he confronts the Captain and learns the shocking truth about the man, his allegiances, and the nature of love.

A Chance For Mr Lever

Stories in the Travelman Short Stories series take the reader to places of mystery, fantasy, horror, romance, and corners of the universe yet unexplored. In turn, readers take them on the bus or subway, slip them into briefcases and lunchboxes, and send them from Jersey to Juneau. Each classic or original short story is printed on one sheet of paper and folded like a map. This makes it simple to read while commuting, convenient to carry when not, and easy to give or send to a friend. A paper envelope is provided for mailing or gift giving, and both are packaged in a clear plastic envelope for display. The cost is not much more than a greeting card.

The Destructors

Starring Dame Hilda Bracket as Aunt Augusta, this is a Radio 4 dramatization of Graham Greene’s novel in which a retired bank manager accompanies his aunt to exotic parts of the world. Henry is introduced to the wilder shores of life, and a morality far beyond his own narrow suburban experience.

No Man’s Land

Recently unearthed from a collection of papers, No Man’s Land is a profoundly chilling tale of espionage, superstition, and betrayal, bearing all the hallmarks of Greene’s most famous works. Presented here with The Stranger’s Hand. Foreword by David Lodge. Arriving in the Harz Mountains, within striking distance of the Iron Curtain, ‘civilian’ Brown appears to be enjoying a small vacation. Yet one night, he crosses into the Russian zone, claiming to be drawn to a site of Catholic pilgrimage. His cover is not quite convincing enough, however, and he finds himself arrested and interrogated. Refusing to confess the real reason behind his visit, he gains an unexpected ally, and the two of them embark upon a hazardous plan to complete his mission and return to the West. The result is a remarkable, psychologically charged exploration of fear and crossed frontiers. Author and playwright Graham Greene 1904 91 is best known for his works Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, and The Heart of the Matter.

Twenty-One Stories

A collection of short stories by the author of ‘Brighton Rock’, ‘The Quiet American’, ‘The Power and the Glory’ and ‘Our Man in Havana’.

May We Borrow Your Husband?&Other Comedies of the Sexual Life

Author William Harris is spending the fag end of the season at Antibes finishing his first attempt at historical biography, but he becomes more and more interested and involved in the antics of two homosexual interior decorators intent on stealing Poopy Travis’s honeymoon husband. Which leaves him free to fall in love with Poopy himself. A widow and a divorcee tipsily discuss the inadequacy of men, deciding that women have much more to offer each other by way of variety in sexual love. A wife holidays alone in Jamaica’s cheap season idly hoping for excitement but finding the only man she can have an affair with is far too old and frightened of the dark.. Affairs, obsessions, grand passions and tiny ardours this collection contains some of Greene’s saddest observations on the hilarity of sex.

The Portable Graham Greene

In a range of work including novels of literary suspense that test both their protagonists souls and their readers nerves to the breaking point, Graham Greene explored a territory located somewhere on the border between despair and faith, treachery and love. This volume includes the complete novels The Heart of the Matter and The Third Man, along with excerpts from ten other novels; short stories; selections from Greene’s memoirs and travel writings; essays on English and American literature; and public statements on issues that range from repression in the Soviet Union to torture in Northern Ireland to the paradoxical virtue of disloyalty.

Complete Short Stories

Affairs, obsessions, ardors, fantasy, myth, legend and dream, fear, pity, and violence this magnificent collection of stories illuminates all corners of the human experience. Previously published in two volumes Collected Short Stories and The Last Word and Other Stories these forty nine stories reveal Graham Greene in a range of contrasting moods, sometimes cynical and witty, sometimes searching and philosophical. Each one confirms V. S. Pritchett’s statement that Greene is a master of storytelling.

The Last Word and Other Stories

This collection of stories speaks to timeless themes such as religious faith, confused loyalties, and the human bonds that bring light into the most sorrowful moments. They are arranged in reverse chronological order and have previously been published in a selection of magazines and newspapers.

The Little Horse Bus

Mr Potter began to lose customers when a grand emporium opened across from his corner shop and delivered their parcels by hansom cab. Even when Mr Potter started delivering by horse bus it made no difference until there was a serious robbery.

The Little Steamroller

Mr Potter began to lose customers when a grand emporium opened across from his corner shop and delivered their parcels by hansom cab. Even when Mr Potter started delivering by horse bus it made no difference until there was a serious robbery.

Journey Without Maps

His mind crowded with vivid images of Africa, Graham Greene set off in 1935 to discover Liberia, a remote and unfamiliar republic founded for released slaves. Now with a new introduction by Paul Theroux, Journey Without Maps is the spellbinding record of Greene’s journey. Crossing the red clay terrain from Sierra Leone to the coast of Grand Bassa with a chain of porters, he came to know one of the few areas of Africa untouched by colonization. Western civilization had not yet impinged on either the human psyche or the social structure, and neither poverty, disease, nor hunger seemed able to quell the native spirit.

The Lawless Roads / Another Mexico

Now with a new introduction by David Rieff, The Lawless Roads is the result of Graham Greene’s expedition to Mexico in the late 1930s to report on how the inhabitants had reacted to the brutal anticlerical purges of President Calles. His journey took him through the tropical states of Chiapas and Tabasco, places where all the churches had been destroyed or closed and the priests driven out or shot. The experience provided Greene with the setting and theme for one of his greatest novels, The Power and the Glory.

British Dramatists

Part of the Writers’ Britain series, first published in the 1940s, this book offers Graham Greene’s evaluation of British drama, from its roots in the Mystery and Miracle plays of the market carnival through Shakespeare and the Restoration to the 20th century.

Collected Essays

Contains nearly 80 of Greene’s essays, reviews and occasional pieces composed between novels, plays and travel books over four decades, covering an eclectic and stimulating range of subjects. Originally published by the Bodley Head in 1969.

Lord Rochester’s Monkey: Being the Life of John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester

‘Lord Rochester’s Monkey’ was written between 1931 and 1934 and, because of the reputation of its subject, the notorious Restoration libertine and poet, the book failed to find a publisher. Rochester was the most prominent of rakes. He was also a fine lyrical and satirical poet whose work, in Greene’s opinion, has been greatly underestimated, being overshadowed by his life of lechery and drunkenness, wild pranks and practical jokes. At court, Charles II suffered but respected Rochester’s coruscating satires, joined in his erotic escapades and rewarded him with distinctions. Yet the last thirteen years of his life were ‘clouded by the fumes of drink’ and literary quarrels. On his deathbed in 1680 he was only 33 he called for Dr Burnet and repented. His friend Etheridge wrote of him: ‘I know he is a devil, but had something of the angel yet undefac’d in him’.

Why Do I Write? (With: Elizabeth Bowen,V.S. Pritchett)

Seven interesting letters which share interesting insights on how writers live and what does and does not affect them in the contemporary world as they go about arriving at their concerns.

Ways of Escape

In this exceptional and fascinating memoir, Graham Greene, who has been called the greatest English novelist of his time, retraces the experiences and encounters of a long and extraordinary life. In Ways of Escape , Greene takes each of his novels as a point of departure for bringing together his reflections on his life and writing over 50 years. 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 crafts of writing. Filled with wit, compassion and insight, Ways of Escape is also a unique contribution to the understanding of a great novelist, a man who throughout his life always chose to remain private, in the shadows. Praise for Graham Greene: There is no better storyteller in English today. V.S. Pritchett As good as the best of its kind marvelously rich. William Trevor, The Guardian

A World of My Own: A Dream Diary

Drawing on his private world of dreams, the author of The Power and the Glory provides readers with an inner glimpse at the fantasy life that he considered integral to his creative expression.National

The Spy’s Bedside Book

A classic compendium of espionage stories penned by some of the greatest writers and most famous spies. With a new introduction by Stella Rimington, former head of MI5. The foxhunter, the angler, the cricketer each has had his own bedside book. Why not the spy? First published in 1957, The Spy’s Bedside Book provoked much interest and pleasure and, perhaps unsurprisingly, a hundred copies were bought by East German Intelligence. This classic anthology, beautifully repackaged as a small format hardback, will enthrall readers once again with its tales of espionage from a bygone era, while also revealing a secret or two, such as how to hide messages in a boiled egg and why you should always put pepper in your vodka when in Russia. Most of the great writers on spying and many practitioners are represented in these pages: Sir Robert Baden Powell and Belle Boyd, Ian Fleming and John Buchan, Walter Schellenberg and Major Andre, Sir Paul Dukes and Vladimir Petrov and from the golden age of espionage, William Le Queux and E. Phillips Oppenheim. William Blake, D.H. Lawrence and Thomas Mann, all suspected of espionage in three great wars, are some of the unexpected figures.

The Killing Spirit

A collection of writings about hit men, including stories, screenplays, and poems and with an appendix listing hit man films includes works by such writers as Hemingway, Graham Greene, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Charles Bukowski, Malinda Macollum, and Robert Lowell.

Crime Never Pays

A selection of short stories in the Bookworm Collection series. The texts are neither graded nor adapted, and each book contains biographical information about the authors, notes on the texts, and language activities.