Amy Foster: A desperate love story that begins with a shipwreck

Joseph Conrad was born on 3rd December 1857 in Berdychiv in the Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire. His birthplace had been part of Poland which its neighbours dismembered into their own Empires.

Conrad's early years were spent in constant movement, his father was politically active and frequently in trouble trying to help re-ignite a Polish state which meant arrests and exile and the young Conrad himself suffered from ill-health, spending a year at a retreat in Kyiv recovering.

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