24. The Stranger by Albert Camus

Meursault is a young Algerian who at the opening of this short novel has just lost his mother. Traveling to the old people’s home in Marengo, it soon becomes apparent that he is not affected by her death and in fact doesn’t even want to view her body. Once Meursault goes back to his home, he resumes his regular life of eating out at Celeste’s restaurant, trying to date a woman named Marie, and becoming mixed up with a local pimp who beats his girlfriends. It is during an outing with this man, Raymond, that Meursault gets into a fight with a group of Arabs and ends up shooting one of the Arab men five times and killing him. The second part of the novel takes part when Meursault is imprisoned for his actions and deals with his subsequent and increasingly absurd trial.

The Stranger was published in 1942 when Paris was occupied by German forces. Over the years, Camus’ character Meursault has become one of the most famous existential characters in literature. This deceptively short and seemingly simple work deals with what readers initially think of as mundane events of a not very likable man, yet forces readers to examine why Meursault killed the unnamed Arab on the beach that day. For readers who liked Franz Kafka’s The Trial.