Joseph Conrad’s last completed novel is a masterpiece of narrative tension and psychological insight. Set in the late eighteenth century and centred around the morally ambiguous figure of Captain Peyrot—a seafarer returning to France in the wake of the revolutionary Terror—The Rover presents a compelling vision of a life lived outside of law and social convention. Like much of Conrad’s greatest work, this once-neglected text is shot through with its author’s hard-won insights into the drama and tragedy of life at sea and his extraordinary sensitivity to ethical and political complexities. It deserves to be recognised at last as one of the major novels of the early Modernist period.
