Books by Albert Camus

“These notebooks give many insights into Camus as a person, who he was and what he was trying to come to terms with day by day. They are indispensable, I think, for understanding what his larger project was throughout the rest of his writings.” Read more...

The Best Books by Albert Camus

Jamie Lombardi, Philosopher

“This is a series of his political and literary essays that give you a sense both of who he was as a critical writer, as an essayist, and as a journalist, but also ties into his philosophy and the ideas that he was trying to make sense of.” Read more...

The Best Books by Albert Camus

Jamie Lombardi, Philosopher

“This is my absolute favourite novel by Camus. It’s very short…One of the things that makes this one so interesting, particularly once you get a sense of who Camus was as a person, is how autobiographical it is and how much of this is him putting himself in the seat of judgment, trying to make sense of his own place in the world, his own decisions, and the impact that he’s had on other people…The narrator is telling the story of how, as he’s on the way home from work one night, a woman jumps from the bridge into the river and there’s this moment where he’s able to make a decision. He can turn back and save the woman, or he can continue on his path.” Read more...

The Best Books by Albert Camus

Jamie Lombardi, Philosopher

“This is Camus’ most academic book. It’s his attempt to make sense of the historical, political, and literary influences that have shaped our world, and how they inform our values in an attempt to figure out where we must go next. This is not as lyrical a book as any of the others, although there’s a chapter at the end where he talks about transcending nihilism that is quite powerful and he’s at his most eloquent.” Read more...

The Best Books by Albert Camus

Jamie Lombardi, Philosopher

“It’s the story of a character called Meursault. One day, he’s on the beach, and he shoots a character called an Arab. They have no specific name—he was an indigenous person on the beach. A trial takes place and we realize that Meursault is facing what Camus calls the ‘nakedness of man faced with the absurd.’ He is floating about, really. He doesn’t show empathy. He doesn’t show remorse. Everything is absurd. The novel starts, in fact, with him just finding out his mother has died. He doesn’t seem to be mourning or grieving or expressing strong feelings. To me, it’s a very, very important book. It’s an allegory of Algeria and the colonial system, because lots of people in Algeria were behaving like Meursault, in a way.” Read more...

The best books on Algeria

Xavier Le Clerc, Novelist

“The Myth of Sisyphus is a small work, but Camus’s meditation on faith and fate has personally been hugely important in developing my ideas. Writing in the embers of World War II, Camus confronts in The Myth of Sisyphus both the tragedy of recent history and what he sees as the absurdity of the human condition.” Read more...

The best books on Morality Without God

Kenan Malik, Science Writer

“It has been said that he did extensive research for The Plague. The ‘plague’ is generally taken to be a metaphor or meta-commentary on Nazism during World War II. I’m not necessarily sold on that as the exclusive interpretation of the novel. Other people have argued that he was reading about plagues during the time that he was writing this. But one thing that’s really interesting in the background is that, for at least a period of time while writing the novel, Camus was trying to recover from a bout of tuberculosis and he was staying in a village in southern France in the Free Zone (Vichy). The remarkable events that took place there were the basis for the book called Lest Innocent Blood be Shed by Philip Paul Hallie. In this small, poor, rural village they banded together and pooled their resources to save somewhere between three and five thousand Jews from the Nazis. Camus was in this village as this was happening, as people were hiding, as they were separated from their loved ones, while he himself was separated from his loved ones. So, I’m not sure to what degree the astute nature of his writing can be attributed to his reading about previous plagues, or to his first-hand experience of being bedridden with an illness, embedded in a town where people were hiding from a much more militaristic and malignant sort of ‘plague’.” Read more...

The Best Books by Albert Camus

Jamie Lombardi, Philosopher