Books like 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.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of The Stranger
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.
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.
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 Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick
Josef Bloch, a construction fitter and former goalkeeper, takes a remark at work as his dismissal, drifts around Vienna, kills a cinema cashier and takes a bus to a village near the border.
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.
Doctor Glas
A lonely Stockholm doctor's diary records his fascination with a young patient and his loathing for her clergyman husband, and his slow reasoning towards whether he should kill him.
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.
Cosmopolis
A billionaire currency trader drives across Manhattan in a limousine on a single day, watching his fortune and the world order disintegrate in real time.
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.
Notes from Underground
A bitter clerk in St. Petersburg writes a confession that swings between self-loathing and grandiosity, inventing the template for every unreliable narrator who followed.
The Age of Reason
Over two days in Paris in the summer of 1938, Mathieu Delarue, a philosophy teacher who prizes his freedom above everything, tries to raise the money for his mistress's abortion.
Boulder
A lesbian line cook named Boulder agrees to have a child with her partner and watches her desire and identity unravel into brine and rock.