Best of the Backlist Book Club: “The Tenth Man” by Graham Greene

Graham Greene’s postwar existential thriller, The Tenth Man, provides the text for this literary analysis session at Bookstore1Sarasota. The conversation delves into the moral complexities of Greene’s plot, which follows a wealthy French lawyer held in a World War II German prison camp who trades his fortune to a fellow inmate in exchange for his life. Readers will examine the psychological tension of the protagonist’s eventual return to his own estate under an assumed identity. The gathering focuses on unpacking the author's recurring themes of guilt, Catholic theology, and compromised ethics, offering a deep read of a work written in 1944 but left unpublished for forty years.