The Plague

A novel set in the Algerian port of Oran in the 1940s, where rats begin dying in the streets and an epidemic of bubonic plague follows. The authorities hesitate, then seal the town, and its people are cut off from the outside world and from those they love. The chronicle follows a small group: Dr Bernard Rieux, who treats the sick without illusions; Jean Tarrou, a visitor who organises volunteer sanitary teams; Rambert, a journalist who plans to escape to the woman he loves in Paris; Grand, a modest clerk endlessly polishing the first sentence of a novel; Cottard, who thrives on the disorder; and the Jesuit Father Paneloux, whose first sermon presents the plague as punishment for sin. The agonising death of a child forces Rieux and Paneloux to confront the suffering of the innocent. Widely read as an allegory of the German occupation of France, the novel's ethic is one of solidarity and common decency: fighting suffering because it is there, without needing heroism or final answers.

It is Camus's fullest answer to the absurd, showing how people can act well together without certainty, and it reads with new force after recent pandemics.