The Stranger

Meursault does not cry at his mother's funeral. That is the whole engine of the book: not the killing on the beach that lands him in court, but the fact that he refuses to perform the feelings people expect from him, and a society that finds this unforgivable. By the end, the prosecution is trying him less for the murder than for his character.

Camus wrote it in flat, short, almost affectless sentences — the style is the argument. It opens on one of the most famous first lines in literature and never once raises its voice.

It is usually shelved as existentialism, which Camus himself rejected. His term was the absurd: the gap between our demand that life mean something and a universe that offers no answer. The last pages, where Meursault finally makes his peace with an indifferent world, are strangely calming rather than bleak.