Recommendations
Books Like Nostromo by Joseph Conrad
Conrad fiction, political epic novels, and books about imperialism and the corruption of idealism
If Nostromo impressed you with its political scope and Conrad's account of silver corrupting every form of idealism, these eight works share its panoramic ambition, its dark view of material interest as the real motor of history, and its sense of the Latin American and colonial world as a space of irreducible moral complexity.
- 1
Buy on AmazonHeart of Darkness
by Joseph Conrad
Conrad's concentrated masterpiece of colonial horror — the argument of Nostromo at its most nightmarish and concentrated; Kurtz's 'material interests' reduced to pure darkness.
- 2
Buy on AmazonLord Jim
by Joseph Conrad
Conrad's moral novel — the individual scale to Nostromo's political one; where Nostromo examines what material interests do to an entire society, Lord Jim examines what a single moral failure does to one man.
- 3
Buy on AmazonOne Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel García Márquez
García Márquez's Buendía family saga in Macondo — the Latin American epic that Nostromo helped make possible; García Márquez cited Conrad as an influence on his sense of the Caribbean and South American political world.
- 4
Buy on AmazonThe Autumn of the Patriarch
by Gabriel García Márquez
García Márquez's political novel of a Caribbean dictator — the South American political world that Nostromo established as serious literary territory, rendered in Magical Realist form.
- 5
Buy on AmazonDarkness at Noon
by Arthur Koestler
Koestler's novel of idealism corrupted by the logic of political power — Nostromo's argument about material interests applied to Soviet Communism; a man who dedicated his life to a cause discovers the cause requires him to lie.
- 6
Buy on AmazonBlood Meridian
by Cormac McCarthy
McCarthy's 1985 novel of historical violence in the American Southwest — the same bleak view of material interest and human nature that Nostromo establishes, without Conrad's narrative complexity but with equal moral force.
- 7
Buy on AmazonThe Treasure of the Sierra Madre
by B. Traven
Traven's 1927 novel of gold fever in Mexico — three men whose fellowship is destroyed by the gold they find; the corrupting power of precious metal in the Western hemisphere, directly in Nostromo's tradition.
- 8
Buy on AmazonThe Secret Agent
by Joseph Conrad
Conrad's 1907 London novel of anarchists, police informers, and a pointless terrorist bombing — the same political intelligence as Nostromo applied to the European revolutionary underground.
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