A Happy Death

Patrice Mersault needs money. Not for trivial things — for the most serious purpose he can imagine: enough money to live freely, to choose his own hours, his own location, his own pace, and to die, finally, in happiness. To get it, he kills a man. Then he uses the money to travel — to Prague, to Genoa, to a house full of friends in Algeria — looking for the life that deserves the death he has arranged for it.

Written before The Stranger and revised several times, A Happy Death is the novel Camus chose not to publish in his lifetime. Posthumously published in 1971, it is more personal, more lyrical, and more explicitly autobiographical than the famous novel that succeeded it — the Mediterranean light, the love of swimming and sun, the persistent sense of a life trying to justify itself against the certainty of its own extinction are all more nakedly present here.

Essential for anyone who wants to understand Camus fully — and a genuinely beautiful novel in its own right. Richard Howard’s translation captures the lyrical clarity of the original. Published by Penguin Modern Classics.