The Plague

Plague breaks out in the Algerian city of Oran, the gates are shut, and an ordinary town has to work out how to behave when there is no prospect of rescue and no meaning to be found in the suffering. Dr Rieux keeps working, not because he expects to win, but because the alternative is not working.

Written just after the occupation of France, it was read immediately as an allegory for fascism and the resistance — Camus did not discourage that. But it survives the allegory. Read it during any real epidemic and the social detail is uncomfortably exact: the denial, the rumours, the profiteering, the bureaucratic delay, the way people adjust to the unbearable and then forget it the moment it lifts.

Where The Stranger is about one man refusing to pretend, this is about what solidarity looks like once you have accepted that the universe is not on your side.