The Plague
Albert Camus, 1947
Literary fiction Contemporary fiction
A port city is sealed off by plague, and ordinary people must decide what decency costs when the routines that held them together stop.
Feels like dread, unease and tenderness. About death, society and morality.
A page from the book
The simplest fact can become a capital offense.
There always comes a time in history when the person who dares to say that 2+2=4 is punished by death. And the issue is not what reward or what punishment will be the outcome of that reasoning. The issue is simply whether or not 2+2=4. Albert Camus.Camus played goalkeeper for a university team in Algiers and later said football taught him about morality and responsibility.
Books that feel like this
More by Albert Camus
The Stranger
Albert Camus, 1942
A clerk in sunstruck Algiers reports his own indifference to love, grief and guilt with unnerving calm.
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Questions readers ask
- What is The Plague like?
- Feels like dread, unease and tenderness. About death, society and morality.
- What should I read after The Plague?
- If you liked The Plague, try Mr. Mercedes (Stephen King), Blindness (José Saramago) and Go Set a Watchman (Harper Lee).
A taste of the feed
A belief system built out of certainty and dust.
Every religion lies. Every moral precept is a delusion. Even the stars are a mirage. The truth is darkness, and the only thing that matters is making a statement before one enters it. Cutting the skin of the world and leaving a scar. That’s all history is, after all: scar tissue.
Mr. Mercedes · Stephen King
If we weighed every consequence, we would never leave the chair.
If, before every action, we were to begin by weighing up the consequences, thinking about them in earnest, first the immediate consequences, then the probable, then the possible, then the imaginable ones, we should never move beyond the point where our first thought brought us to a halt. The good and evil resulting from our words and deeds go on apportioning themselves, one assumes in a reasonably uniform and balanced way, throughout all the days to follow, including those endless days, when we shall not be here to find out, to congratulate ourselves or ask for pardon, indeed there are those who claim that this is the much talked of immortality.
Blindness · José Saramago
The day a parent stops being a god and becomes a person.
As you grew up, when you were grown, totally unknown to yourself, you confused your father with God. You never saw him as a man with a man’s heart, and a man’s failings—I’ll grant you it may have been hard to see, he makes so few mistakes, but he makes ’em like all of us.
Go Set a Watchman · Harper Lee
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