Essential reading for old fans and new admirers of Albert Camus' classic quarantine novel THE PLAGUE - a new bestseller amidst the coronavirus pandemic. 'Brilliant.' The Times 'Joyous ... A unique critical talent.' TLS Albert Camus is one of the most famous French writers of the twentieth century, a Nobel Laureate celebrated for his classic existentialist novelThe Outsider and urgently relevant allegory of a pandemic, The Plague. But what about his controversial attitudes to race, especially his portrayal of Arabs versus Europeans, and French colonialism in Algeria? As provocative and brilliantly argued as it was in 1970, Conor Cruise O'Brien's Camus is a groundbreaking postcolonial critique which revolutionised how Camus was viewed by a new generation.

Conor Cruise O'Brien's penetrative reading of Albert Camus, Nobel laureate and author of L'Étranger and La Peste, was originally published in 1970.

'O'Brien's Camus is brilliant. While having been himself profoundly moved by Camus's work, he asks why students have so often misinterpreted him.' Marghanita Laski, The Times

'[Camus] displays O'Brien's cultivated intelligence at its most joyous pitch, and . . . demonstrates his unique critical talent . . . [O'Brien] demonstrates that Camus was far from being an exemplar of the truly independent intellectual and that his conception of "Mediterranean culture" served to legitimise France's possession of Algeria . . . O'Brien's prose has a sweet rigour as he first explores Camus's sense of estrangement and unreality, and then places his work within a social context.' Tom Paulin, Times Literary Supplement