Almayer's Folly

Far up an Eastern river, in the settlement of Sambir on the coast of Borneo, the Dutch trader Kaspar Almayer sits in a rotting, half-finished house the local sailors have mockingly named “Almayer’s Folly.” His trade has collapsed, his patron has vanished, and everything he has left is invested in a single dream: the secret gold mine that will make him rich, and the glittering European future he means to give his beloved daughter, Nina.

But Nina is the child of a white father and a Malay mother, returned from the European world wounded by its contempt, and she does not want the life her father imagines for her. When the handsome Malay prince Dain Maroola comes upriver, he and Nina fall in love — and around their secret the novel’s quiet machinery begins to turn, drawing in Almayer’s embittered wife, the Dutch authorities, and a body found floating in the river. When Nina at last chooses Dain and her mother’s world over her father and his, Almayer’s dream collapses all at once.

The first of Conrad’s “Malay” novels and the book that launched his career after twenty years at sea, Almayer’s Folly is a dense, atmospheric, deeply ironic study of self-delusion and colonial decay — the seed of the great novels to come, already saturated with the river, the jungle, and the moral scepticism that would make Conrad’s name.

This edition presents the complete public-domain text of the 1895 novel in clean, readable typesetting prepared for the modern e-reader, with an editor’s foreword on the book’s origins and lasting interest, a biographical note on Joseph Conrad, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.