The war -this "black plague"- breaks out in Europe. France is torn on the banks of the Somme and the Loire, with millions of captives in the crematoria. The war intensifies separation, absence, illness, and insecurity.

But are we not always under threat, isolated, exiled, as the fruit is from the worm? "The Plague," Camus' second great novel after "The Outsider," records the behavior of people in a world that seems aimless and devoid of future, in a world of suffocating repetition and monotony.

And what characterizes people is not the empire of their flesh, but the silences, their hidden wounds, the shadows they cast on the challenges of life.

[Excerpt from the text on the back cover of the edition]