(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)<br><br>Albert Camus's spare, laconic masterpiece about a Frenchman who murders an Arab in Algeria is famous for having diagnosed, with a clarity almost scientific, that condition of reckless alienation and spiritual exhaustion that characterized so much of twentieth-century life. <br><br>Possessing both the force of a parable and the excitement of a perfectly executed thriller, <i>The Stranger</i> is the work of one of the most engaged and intellectually alert writers of the past century. <br><br>Translated by Matthew Ward