The Plague
by Albert Camus
A city sealed off by disease. What happens inside.
For you if
you want to understand collective crisis — what it reveals about human nature and what it demands from us
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An Algerian port city is sealed off by bubonic plague. The novel follows a doctor, a journalist, a priest, a criminal, a civil servant — each responding to the catastrophe differently. Camus wrote it as an allegory for the Nazi occupation of France but it is also a literal dispatch about epidemic, about how people organize themselves around shared suffering, about the particular heroism of just continuing to do your job when everything is pointless. Re-read after 2020 it becomes something different again. A book that keeps arriving at the right moment.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- France • Europe
- Voice
- Written by a French author
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Flip the lens
Same country. Now hear it from the other side.
For the family bookshelf
Same idea, written for a younger reader. Good for reading together.
