Almayer's Folly (Version 3)

The novel that launched one of English literature's most haunted imaginations. Conrad's first book is a darkly beautiful fable about the dreams we build and the ruins we become. Almayer is a Dutch trader rotting on the coast of Borneo, chasing a myth of inland gold that might carry him and his daughter Nina back to a Netherlands neither has ever seen. But Nina, with her mixed blood and her fierce Filipino mother, has her own loyalties, her own plans. As the river of Almayer's ambition runs dry, father and daughter drift toward collision. This is Conrad working out the obsessions that would become Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim: identity as wound, the East as dream and trap, the colonial enterprise as a folly in every sense. If you want to understand where the darkness began, start here.