Reading Order
L'ÉtrangerThe Stranger Reading Order
Albert Camus's The Stranger (L'Étranger, 1942) is a standalone novel — there is no series and no sequel. Meursault, a French Algerian, kills an Arab on a beach. At his trial, he is condemned as much for his failure to grieve his mother's death as for the killing itself. The defining existentialist novel and one of the best-selling French novels ever written.
Where to start
The Stranger
Complete L'Étranger Book List
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The Stranger
Albert Camus·1942·Standalone novel — Meursault in Algiers, the beach, the trial; approximately 120 pages; Camus was twenty-seven when he wrote it; published in French as L'Étranger (also translated as The Outsider); the most accessible entry point to existentialist and absurdist fiction and one of the most widely assigned literary novels in Western education - Buy
The Plague
OptionalAlbert Camus·1947·A bubonic plague in the Algerian city of Oran — Camus's second major novel and the companion to The Stranger; where The Stranger focuses on an individual consciousness confronting death alone, The Plague focuses on a community's collective response to mass death; more explicitly humanist and more socially engaged than The Stranger - Buy
The Fall
OptionalAlbert Camus·1956·Jean-Baptiste Clamence, a former lawyer now living in Amsterdam, delivering an extended monologue confession to a stranger in a bar — Camus's last completed novel; the most sophisticated and darkest of his fiction; a self-lacerating examination of the narrator's own moral failures dressed as a philosophical monologue
L'Étranger — Frequently Asked Questions
What does 'The Stranger' mean?
The French title, L'Étranger, means both 'the stranger' and 'the foreigner' — Meursault is a stranger to himself (he doesn't understand his own emotions), a stranger to the social world around him (he refuses to perform the emotions the world requires), and a foreigner in his own country (French Algeria, where the French are colonists in a country that belongs to others). The title works simultaneously as a description of Meursault's psychological condition and as an implicit critique of French colonialism: the 'stranger' is the man who does not belong, but the people who most obviously do not belong in Algeria are the French settlers themselves.
What is absurdism, and how does The Stranger express it?
Absurdism is Camus's philosophical position, most fully articulated in his essay The Myth of Sisyphus (published the same year as The Stranger, 1942): the world has no inherent meaning, human beings naturally seek meaning, and the confrontation between these two facts is 'the absurd.' The Stranger expresses this through Meursault: a man who does not lie about his emotions, does not perform the meaning-making rituals (grief, remorse, fear of death) that society requires, and faces his execution without the consolation of religion or the terror of meaninglessness. Camus saw Meursault's radical honesty as a kind of heroism.
Is The Stranger a good starting point for Camus?
Yes — The Stranger is the standard starting point for Camus and remains one of the most readable of the existentialist-adjacent novels. It is short (120 pages), written in the first person in simple, declarative prose, and immediately engaging. The Plague is a natural second Camus: longer, more humane, and more politically engaged; The Fall is a better third, being the most sophisticated of his novels. Readers who want the philosophical background should read The Myth of Sisyphus, which is a readable essay and provides the intellectual framework for The Stranger.
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