‘Good night, mon chéri. May tomorrow come quickly, and all the other days when you will belong more to me than to that damned play. I kiss you with all my might.’ —Albert Camus to Maria Casarès, June 1944

The affair between Albert Camus and Maria Casarès began in wartime, on 6 June 1944. Casarès was starring in a production of Camus’ play The Misunderstanding, and at an after-party hosted by Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, the actress and Nobel Prize-winning author embarked on a love affair that would unfold in hundreds of vivid and moving letters over 15 years.

Translated into English for the first time, these 865 letters reveal the impassioned heights and depths of Casarès and Camus’ relationship. They wax lyrical, they rage, they traverse Parisian streets and gaze upon the Luberon mountains, they discuss stardom and everyday life. Letters: 1944-1959 draws back the curtain on the intimate personal lives of two extraordinary artists, who wrote persistently and copiously to one another until Camus’ fatal car crash in January 1960.