The Plague

A coastal city sealed off by government decree. A doctor who stays when he could leave. A journalist who wants only to return to his wife and cannot. A priest whose faith is tested beyond any framework it provides. A criminal who flourishes. And over all of them, spreading through the city like a theological argument, the plague.

Published in France in 1947, in the aftermath of occupation and liberation, Albert Camus’s greatest novel was immediately read as an allegory — of the Nazis, of collaboration, of the choices ordinary people make when extraordinary circumstances strip away their comfortable assumptions about who they are. Camus always said it was about something larger: about the human condition itself, about the persistence of suffering, and about what it means to respond to suffering honestly rather than conveniently.

Robin Buss’s acclaimed translation captures the measured, lucid clarity of Camus’s prose — a style that feels, in the face of horror, like an ethical act in itself. More relevant now than ever. One of the essential novels of the twentieth century. Published by Penguin Modern Classics.