The Stranger

A short novel published in 1942 in occupied France and known in Britain as The Outsider. It is narrated in flat, plain sentences by Meursault, a clerk in French Algiers, who opens by reporting his mother's death in an old people's home and attends her funeral without showing grief. In the days that follow he swims, begins an affair with Marie and agrees to help his neighbour Raymond in a quarrel. On a blinding hot beach he shoots an Arab man. Part Two follows his imprisonment and trial, in which the prosecution dwells less on the killing than on his apparent coldness at the funeral and his refusal to pretend to feelings he does not have. The novel dramatises what Camus called the absurd, the clash between our demand for meaning and a silent world, and asks what honesty, guilt and judgement mean for someone who will not play society's game. Later readers, including Kamel Daoud, have noted the victim's namelessness and the colonial setting.

It is the shortest and most direct way into Camus's idea of the absurd, and its unsettling narrator still provokes argument about honesty, emotion and justice.