A man’s mother dies. He goes to the funeral, returns to Algiers, begins an affair, helps a neighbour with a sordid dispute and, almost incidentally, kills a man on a beach. 

But, Meursault’s great offence is not simply murder but his refusal—or inability—to perform the emotions expected of him. In Camus’s severe, lucid prose, the everyday world becomes almost unnervingly physical: heat, light, exhaustion, cigarettes, sex, hunger. Against that material immediacy sit the narratives other people construct around him, until his failure to pretend becomes evidence in itself. First published as L’Étranger in 1942, The Outsider remains Camus’s sharpest fictional expression of the absurd: the confrontation between our hunger for coherence and a world under no obligation to provide it.

Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1974. Penguin Modern Classics. English translation first published by Hamish Hamilton in 1946; first Penguin edition 1961. Later 1974 printing. Paperback. Some age-toning to pages and light shelf wear to covers and edges; binding sound. Very good vintage condition.