The Outsider

Meursault is an Algerian office worker who attends his mother’s funeral, feels almost nothing, and a few days later, on a blindingly bright beach, shoots an Arab man he barely knows. He is not sure why. The sun was in his eyes. The trial that follows is a spectacular demonstration of how society constructs the meaning of acts that, in themselves, meant nothing.

Camus’s The Outsider — also known as The Stranger — is the novel that launched the philosophy of absurdism and remains one of the most discussed and most translated books of the twentieth century. Its surface is extraordinarily simple: short sentences, minimal interiority, events reported without interpretation. But beneath that surface lies one of the most precise philosophical provocations in modern fiction.

This Penguin Modern Classics edition presents a fresh, acclaimed translation that restores the flatness and neutrality of Camus’s original French — the very quality that makes the novel’s impact so quietly devastating. One of the essential European novels of the last hundred years. Published by Penguin Modern Classics.