A French clerk named Meursault, living in colonial Algiers, receives a telegram: his mother has died. He attends the funeral but feels nothing. He returns to Algiers, takes up with an old colleague named Marie, and lets the summer continue. Then, on a hot afternoon at the beach, he kills a man.
Albert Camus's 1942 novella is told in first person, in the flattest French any major twentieth-century novel was written in. Meursault narrates his own life as if from outside. He is tried not really for the murder but for failing to cry at his mother's funeral — and the prosecutor, in a long speech that anchors Part II, calls him a monster for it.
Camus grew up in working-class Algiers, raised by an illiterate mother. He chose to write in the spoken French of his childhood — short sentences, common verbs, plain words — partly as a political stance against the long Parisian sentence, partly because that was the language he loved. The result is the most accessible French novel of the century to a non-native reader.
Companion essay L'Étranger is shorter than you remember — 6 min read
Camus deliberately wrote L'Étranger in the simplest French any major novel of the twentieth century was written in. Passé composé instead of passé simple. Short sentences. Common verbs. The result is the most accessible French novel in the canon — exactly the right book for B1, when you can handle past tense and dialogue but the rare vocabulary of nineteenth-century French still slows you down. With Camus, there is no rare vocabulary.
Intermediate. You read narrative past tense fluently, handle dialogue, and understand short novellas. Vocabulary around 3,000 words. Subordinate clauses no longer slow you down.
Yes — every book in the Storica catalog is available in all seven supported languages: French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, and English. The Stranger was originally written in French, but you choose your reading language when you start.
B1. Intermediate. You read narrative past tense fluently, handle dialogue, and understand short novellas. Vocabulary around 3,000 words. Subordinate clauses no longer slow you down.
About one month at fifteen minutes a day. The adaptation runs to 25 short chapters — short enough to read before bed, long enough to actually move your level.
No. Storica's adaptation is the version you read. We keep the characters, plot beats, and tone of the original — and rewrite the language to fit the level. If you've read the original before, you'll recognise the story; if you haven't, the adaptation is a complete reading of the book.
Pick up where you left off. There are no streaks, no penalties, and no notifications begging you back. Day 12 is still Day 12 a week later.
The Stranger is rated B1, so we'd suggest starting with one of our A0 or A1 books first if you're brand-new to your target language. Check our shelf at /library/ — the readers there are short, gentle, and built specifically for week one.
Your first 30-day book is free. No card. No streak. Just a passage every morning.
Read it free for 7 days →A small group of readers working through classics in their target language — Kafka in German, Camus in French, Bovary in Spanish. Leave your email and we'll send your invitation.
Use this code in the app for 30% off your first year of Storica Pro.