Lord Jim

Lord Jim is a novel by the Polish-British writer Joseph Conrad, published as a serial in Blackwood's Magazine between October 1899 and November 1900. It was ranked among the hundred best English-language novels of the twentieth century by the Modern Library in 1998.

The event the book turns on is the abandonment of a ship carrying pilgrims across the Red Sea. Jim, the first mate, has been hired onto the Patna after recovering from an injury, and when the vessel strikes something in the night and one bulkhead begins to give, the captain and officers take to the boats and leave everything on board. The ship does not go down, and the crew have to live with the consequences of having assumed it would.

The rest of the novel is about what Jim does with that. Conrad tells it out of order and at a distance, mostly through the testimony of a man called Marlow who takes an interest in him, and follows Jim from one obscure posting to another as he seeks a place where he is not known and where he can be something other than the man who jumped.