'On the morning of April 16, Dr Rieux emerged from his consulting-room and came across a dead rat in the middle of the landing.' It starts with the rats. Vomiting blood, they die in their hundreds, then in their thousands. When the rats are all gone, the citizens begin to fall sick. Like the rats, they too die in ever greater numbers.
The authorities quarantine the town. Cut off, the terrified townspeople must face this horror alone. Some resign themselves to death or the whims of fate. Others seek someone to blame or dream of revenge. One is determined to escape.
But a few, like stoic Dr Rieux, stand together to fight the terror. A monstrous evil has entered their lives but they will never surrender to it.
Meursault leads an unremarkable, bachelor life in Algiers, but his sudden involvement in a violent confrontation throws him into turmoil as he is forced to question the fundamental values of society. Camus creates a world without a God but a society that is still subject to restrictive, man-made rules capable of alienating any who transcend them.
In this most memorable of existential novels, Camus pits the lone and courageous individual against the benign indifference of the universe. Meursault's deception perfectly reflects the absurdity of life.
An essay on the nature of human revolt, this book makes a critique of communism, how it had gone wrong behind the Iron Curtain, and the resulting totalitarian regimes. It also questions two events held sacred by the left wing, the French Revolution of 1789 and the Russian Revolution of 1917.
She was waiting, but she didn't know for what. She was aware only of her solitude, and of the penetrating cold, and of a greater weight in the region of her heart.' Camus's writing confronts the great philosophical dilemmas of our time with piercing clarity. These three powerful and evocative stories are heavy with the weight of the human condition, and rich with atmosphere. In them, an ageing labourer, a woman travelling in North Africa with her husband, and a schoolteacher tasked with transporting a prisoner each face their own moral crises.
This book contains The Adulterous Woman, The Silent Men and The Guest.
