Graham Greene

In the Mexican state of Tabasco in the 1930s, all vestiges of Catholicism are being outlawed by the government. As churches are razed, icons are banned, and the price of devotion is execution, an unnamed member of the clergy flees. He's known only as the "whisky priest." Beset by heretical vices, guilt, and an immoral past, he's torn between self-destruction and self-preservation. Too modest to be a martyr, too stubborn to follow the law, and too...

James Wormold, a cash-strapped vacuum cleaner salesman in Havana, finds the answer to his prayers when British Intelligence offers him a lucrative job as an undercover agent. To keep the checks coming, Wormold must at least pretend to know what he's doing. Soon, he's apparently deciphering incomprehensible codes, passing along sketches of secret weapons that look suspiciously like vacuum parts, and claiming to recruit fellow operatives from his country...

A teenage sociopath rises to power in Britain's criminal underworld in this "brilliant and uncompromising" thriller (The New York Times). Seventeen-year-old Pinkie Brown, raised amid the casual violence and corruption in the dire prewar Brighton slums, has left his final judgment in the hands of God. On the streets, impelled by his own twisted moral doctrine, he leads a motley pack of gangsters whose sleazy little rackets have most recently erupted...

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 and their lonely wives-and a small group of enterprising strangers rocking into port on the Dutch cargo ship, Medea: a well-meaning pair of Americans claiming to bring vegetarianism to the natives; a former jungle fighter in World War II Burma and current confidence man;...

It's 1955 and British journalist Thomas Fowler has been in Vietnam for two years covering the insurgency against French colonial rule. But it's not just a political tangle that's kept him tethered to the country. There's also his lover, Phuong, a young Vietnamese woman who clings to Fowler for protection. Then comes Alden Pyle, an idealistic American working in service of the CIA. Devotedly, disastrously patriotic, he believes neither communism nor...

In what Greene calls My Own World-as opposed to the Common World of shared reality-he accompanies Henry James on a disagreeable riverboat trip to Bogota, is caught in a guerilla crossfire with Evelyn Waugh and W. H. Auden, strolls in the Vatican garden with Pope John Paul II who's doling out Perugina chocolates like hosts, offers refuge to a suicidal Charlie Chaplin, and stages a disastrous play in blank verse for Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton....

A modest London accountant on a budget, Mr. Bertram has settled on a honeymoon at the seaside resort of Bournemouth with his fiancée, Cary. However, Bertram's boss, the solicitous Herbert Dreuther, won't hear of anything so common. Bertram and Cary are to be married in Monte Carlo, after which they'll be Dreuther's guests on his private yacht and sail down the coast of Italy. It sounds too lovely to be true. And surely Bertram can afford one night...