These are two very dark novellas in seafaring, colonial settings. Joseph Conrad excels in evoking an atmosphere and creating realistic characters and situations.
Heart of Darkness is a story told by a seaman named Marlowe to his shipmates about an eventful voyage he took down an African river many years ago to an isolated trading post belonging to the company he worked for. Mr. Kurtz, the man in charge of the post is their most productive agent by far but there is something mysterious about the man's methods the company doesn't like and they want to remove him. Marlowe comes to a slow realization of what those methods are as the voyage progresses and is shocked at how a seemingly normal, civilized man could descend to such depths. There is little direct interaction with Kurtz in the story; we get to know him mainly by what others think and say about him and by Marlowe's observations of the trading post and its surroundings.
Secret Sharer, on the other hand, is set in the Far East. The narrator is a young captain brought in at the last minute to replace the skipper of a ship whose crew has worked as a team for a long time. As he's the only newcomer on board and this is his first command he feels ill at ease with the crew. He soon gets a friend with whom to share his predicament in the shape of a fugitive officer from another ship who is in trouble for having killed a man during an emergency. He decides to help the fugitive by hiding him on board even from his own crew until there is a chance to escape. The captain's solidarity with the fugitive is even greater than that with his crew, and the satisfaction of secretly and successfully helping this man escape is what ultimately gives him the confidence to hold his own as captain.
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