The Shadow Line: A Confession (The Concord Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad)

x, 133 pp. Navy blue cloth, gilt titles, decorated endpapers, photographic frontispiece aboard the special service ship Ready. A novel by the author of The Heart of Darkness and numerous nautical stories. Written in 1915, The Shadow-Line is based upon events and experiences from twenty-seven years earlier to which Conrad returned obsessively in his fiction. A young sea captain's first command brings with it a succession of crises: his sea is becalmed, the crew laid low by fever, and his deranged first mate is convinced that the ship is haunted by the malignant spirit of a previous captain.