In the ordinary Algerian port city of Oran, the rats come out to die. First a few, then thousands, and soon the townspeople themselves begin to sicken and fall. The authorities are slow to name the danger, but eventually the truth is undeniable: the plague has arrived, and the city is sealed off, its citizens cut off from the outside world and from the people they love.
Albert Camus follows a handful of men through the long months of quarantine — chiefly Dr. Bernard Rieux, who keeps working without illusion or hope of reward, tending the dying because it is simply what must be done. Around him gather others who each answer the catastrophe in their own way: the visitor Tarrou, who organizes volunteers; the journalist Rambert, desperate to escape and rejoin his wife; the priest Paneloux, who searches for meaning in the suffering; and the profiteer Cottard, who finds the epidemic strangely liberating.
First published in 1947, The Plague (La Peste) is at once a gripping account of a city under siege and a searching allegory about resistance, solidarity, and the absurd. Camus turns an epidemic into a meditation on how ordinary people find dignity and meaning in the face of indifferent, unearned suffering.
