Quick Guide: The Heart of the Matter (Electronic book text)

The Heart of the Matter, a novel by the English author Graham Greene, won the 1948 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. During World War II, Greene worked for the Secret Intelligence Service in Sierra Leone, the setting for his novel. It was enormously popular, selling over 300,000 copies in the United Kingdom upon its release. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked The Heart of the Matter 40th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. In 2005, the novel was chosen by TIME magazine as one of the one hundred best English-language novels from 1923 to the present.