'he murmured with conviction - speaking aloud to himself in the shock of the penetrating thought: I am a lost man' Peter Willems, a clerk in Macassar, granted a 'second chance' at a remote river trading post, falls ever more hopelessly into traps set by himself and others. The pawn of Babalatchi, the one-eyed schemer of power politics, and of the rich Abdulla, who uses Willems to increase his own wealth, his fate is sealed by his lover, Aissa, and by Almayer, an embittered fellow countryman. An Outcast of the Islands (1896), Conrad's second novel, is a tale of intrigue in which love and death are the major players. It is a parable of human frailty, the story of a man unable to understand others and fated never to possess his own soul. This revised edition uses the English first edition text and has a new chronology and bibliography.