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Meursault does not cry at his mother's funeral, drinks a coffee beside the coffin, and is convicted for it more than for the man he shot. Camus wrote that in the passé composé, the tense of ordinary speech, so nothing in the prose tells you what to think. He was thirty when it came out, he was dead at forty-six in a car he did not need to be in, and in between he ran a Resistance newspaper, took the Nobel at forty-four, and lost his closest friendship over whether killing can be justified by what it is for. The writers below hold different ends of that. Two of them argued with him. Two of them are Algerian, and write the people his novels left out.
By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · The absurd · Revolt and witness · Algeria · Updated October 2026
Quick answer
If you like Albert Camus, the three closest are Franz Kafka, whom Camus wrote an appendix about in The Myth of Sisyphus, Fyodor Dostoevsky, whose Demons Camus adapted for the stage himself, and Kamel Daoud, whose The Meursault Investigation retells The Stranger from the dead Arab's family. For the argument he lost, read Jean-Paul Sartre; for the moral source of the later work, Simone Weil, whom Camus edited; and for a living novelist doing his job, Han Kang.
10 authors like Albert Camus
Where to start if you loved Albert Camus
If you have only read The Stranger, read Kamel Daoud next.
The Meursault Investigation gives the murdered man a name and a family. It only works if Camus is fresh in your head, so read it straight after.
If you want where the ideas came from, read Dostoevsky.
Demons first — Camus adapted it for the stage himself, and The Rebel is an argument with it.
If you want the argument he lost, read Sartre.
Nausea for the fiction, then read about the 1952 break. They never spoke again, and both of them meant it.
If you want the absurd without the consolation, read Beckett.
Camus ends at solidarity. Waiting for Godot does not end anywhere, which is the point.
If you want a living novelist doing the same work, read Han Kang.
Human Acts is The Plague's job done for Gwangju in 1980: a chronicle that refuses to turn the dead into a lesson.
If you want his own books in order
My complete guide to Camus has all of them, and explains why the novels only make sense next to the essays and the plays.
Frequently asked questions about authors like Albert Camus
Who writes books most like Albert Camus?
Franz Kafka and Fyodor Dostoevsky are the two Camus himself worked from — he wrote an appendix on Kafka in The Myth of Sisyphus and adapted Dostoevsky's Demons for the stage. Among living writers, Han Kang is the closest: Human Acts does what The Plague does. And Kamel Daoud's The Meursault Investigation is the single book most worth reading straight after The Stranger, because it retells it from the family of the man Meursault kills.
What should I read after The Stranger?
The Meursault Investigation by Kamel Daoud (2013), while the novel is still fresh. It is narrated by the brother of the Arab whom Meursault shoots — a man Camus never named — and it mirrors Camus's plot deliberately, down to the courtroom scene. After that, stay with Camus: The Stranger is one third of an argument he wrote in three forms, alongside the essay The Myth of Sisyphus and the play Caligula.
Was Albert Camus an existentialist?
He said he was not, repeatedly, and he was right to. Camus wrote about the absurd — the gap between a human demand for meaning and a universe that supplies none — and argued that the response is revolt, not the construction of meaning through choice. That is a different position from Sartre's, and their public break in 1952 was partly about it. Bookshops and syllabuses file them together anyway.
Which Camus book should I read first?
The Stranger (1942), because it is short and because everything else assumes it. But know what you are getting: Camus built his books in cycles of three, one novel, one essay, one play, around a single idea. The absurd cycle is The Stranger, The Myth of Sisyphus and Caligula. The revolt cycle is The Plague, The Rebel and The Just. A reader who has only read the novel has read a third of the case.
Why did Camus and Sartre fall out?
Over The Rebel in 1952. Camus argued that revolutionary violence justified by a promised future is the mechanism by which revolutions become murderous. Sartre's journal Les Temps modernes ran a hostile review by Francis Jeanson; Camus replied to Sartre directly; Sartre answered in print that summer. They never spoke again. The disagreement hardened over Algeria, where Sartre supported the FLN and Camus refused to.
Did Camus support Algerian independence?
No, and it is the hardest thing about him. He was born in Algeria to a poor European settler family, reported early and angrily on the starvation of Kabyle villagers, and campaigned against the death penalty and against torture — but he argued for a federated French Algeria rather than independence, and after 1958 said almost nothing in public. Edward Said's reading of The Stranger and The Plague as novels in which Algerians are scenery is now the standard academic position. Mouloud Feraoun and Kamel Daoud, both on this list, are where to go next.
Are there any modern authors like Camus?
Han Kang is the closest working novelist: the Nobel laureate of 2024 writes protagonists whose refusal to perform expected feeling is treated as monstrous, and chronicles of atrocity that refuse to draw a lesson. Kamel Daoud writes directly back at Camus. Outside fiction, the plain-sentence moral essay Camus wrote at Combat has more living descendants in journalism than in novels.
Which translation of The Stranger is best?
Matthew Ward's 1988 translation is the one most often recommended, because it keeps the flat American register and the perfect tense rather than smoothing Camus into literary English. For The Plague, Laura Marris's 2021 translation is the newest and reads far better than the 1948 Gilbert version most secondhand copies still carry.
Sources
- Albert Camus — Nobel Prize in Literature 1957, facts
- Albert Camus — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- The Complete Notebooks, trans. Ryan Bloom — University of Chicago Press, 2025
- Albert Camus — Wikipedia
List last reviewed 5 September 2026.
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“One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
— Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus.
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