At the time of his accidental death in 1960, Nobel Laureate Albert Camus was at work on an ambitious novel which, though unfinished, is every bit as powerful as his earlier masterpieces The Stranger and The Plague. Summoning up the sights, sounds, and textures of his own austere childhood in Algiers, Camus tells the story of Jacques Cormery, a fatherless boy deeply attached to his nearly deaf mother. Following Jacques from his school days through middle age, Camus's saga is also the story of colonial Algeria and its fraught relationship with France.

"Perhaps the most honest book Camus ever wrote, and the most sensual.... It is a work of genius."—The New Yorker