Behind the subterfuge, Camus explores what he termed "the nakedness of man faced with the absurd" and describes the condition of reckless alienation and spiritual exhaustion that characterized so much of twentieth-century life.

"The Stranger is a strikingly modern text and Matthew Ward's translation will enable readers to appreciate why Camus's stoical anti-hero and ­devious narrator remains one of the key expressions of a postwar Western malaise, and one of the cleverest exponents of a literature of ambiguity." --from the Introduction by Peter Dunwoodie

First published in 1946; now in translation by Matthew Ward.