Books like Exile and the Kingdom
Six stories of exile, among them a French schoolteacher on an Algerian plateau told to deliver an Arab prisoner to the police, and a wife who slips out of her bed at night into the desert.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Exile and the Kingdom
A Happy Death
Patrice Mersault, an Algiers shipping clerk, kills a rich, crippled man and takes his money, then sets out to buy the time to be happy.
The Stranger
A man in French Algeria kills an Arab on a beach for no particular reason and is condemned less for the murder than for his failure to cry at his mother's funeral.
The Immoralist
Michel, a young scholar who married without love, nearly dies of tuberculosis on his honeymoon in North Africa, and recovers with a fierce new hunger for life and for the boys around him.
The Wall
Five stories, among them a Republican prisoner in the Spanish Civil War spending the night before his execution, and a bourgeois boy who grows up to be a fascist.
Nausea
A philosopher in 1930s France discovers that the sheer existence of objects fills him with revulsion, and his diary charts the horror of a world without meaning.
Desert
Two stories braided together: the Blue Men of the Sahara driven north by French colonial troops in 1909 and 1910, and Lalla, a girl descended from them, growing up decades later in a shantytown on the Moroccan coast.
Cities of Salt
In a desert oasis in an unnamed Gulf kingdom in the 1930s, Americans arrive looking for oil, and the oasis, its people and their way of life are swept away.
The Meursault Investigation
Harun, an old man in a bar in Oran, tells the story of his brother, the Arab shot on a beach in Camus's The Stranger, who was never even given a name.
Thérèse Desqueyroux
Acquitted of trying to poison her husband, Thérèse Desqueyroux travels home through the pine forests of the Landes, rehearsing the confession she means to make to him.
Ambiguous Adventure
Samba Diallo, a boy of the Diallobé nobility raised in a strict Quranic school, is sent to the French school and then to Paris, and finds himself caught between two worlds.
Barabbas
Barabbas, the thief freed in place of Jesus, watches the crucifixion from a distance and can't stop thinking about the man who died in his place, or about the people who believe in him.
Barren Lives
Fabiano, a cowherd, his wife Sinha Vitória, their two sons and their dog Baleia wander the drought-stricken backlands of north-east Brazil looking for work.