The Stranger – Albert Camus

Albert Camus’s The Stranger is one of the most powerful and unsettling novels of the twentieth century. It follows Meursault, an ordinary man living in Algeria, who seems strangely detached from the world around him. He doesn’t cry at his mother’s funeral, he drifts through his days without passion, and he treats life with a kind of quiet indifference.

But everything changes when, in a moment of heat and impulse, he commits a shocking act of violence. Suddenly, Meursault finds himself on trial—not only for the crime, but for who he is. His lack of grief, his refusal to pretend, his cold honesty—all are judged as harshly as the murder itself.

Through Meursault’s story, Camus forces us to face uncomfortable truths about society, morality, and the meaning—or meaninglessness—of existence. The Stranger is not just a novel, but a confrontation with the absurd, and a timeless question: how should we live when life itself has no clear answers?

The Stranger – Albert Camus