But his journalistic activities had been chiefly a response to the demands of the time in 1947 Camus retired from political journalism and, besides writing his fiction and essays, was very active in the theatre as producer and playwright (e.g., Caligula, 1944). The man and the times met: Camus joined the resistance movement during the occupation and after the liberation was a columnist for the newspaper Combat. Of semi-proletarian parents, early attached to intellectual circles of strongly revolutionary tendencies, with a deep interest in philosophy (only chance prevented him from pursuing a university career in that field), he came to France at the age of twenty-five. His origin in Algeria and his experiences there in the thirties were dominating influences in his thought and work.

In this spirit, Smith is particularly sensitive when constructing Meursault's memories of Algiers and of 'a life which offered… the most subtle but most persistent of joys: the scent of summer, the neighbourhood that I loved, a certain type of sky at night'.Albert Camus (1913-1960) was a representative of non-metropolitan French literature. Camus's Algiers-set tale – of the office worker Meursault gunning down an Arab on the beach and subsequently being sentenced to death by the Franco-Algerian state for refusing to express regret – is partly a philosophical exploration of what Camus called 'the tender indifference of the world', but it's equally a humanist paean to Meursault's everyday epicureanism.

Smith, a Cambridge University don and translator of Irène Némirovsky's Suite Française, has emphasised the absurdist fault lines of Camus's novel through a less laconic, more expansive translation than Laredo's. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know', thereby restoring Camus's protagonist, Meursault, to a dislocating state of shock rather than the cold indifference of Laredo's version. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know.' In Sandra Smith's new translation, she inserts a possessive pronoun: 'My mother died today. In Joseph Laredo's terse, widely read 1982 translation, he renders the opening as: 'Mother died today. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas.' So, famously, opens Albert Camus's 1942 novel L'Etranger, but it's intriguing to see how differently those two sentences have been translated, despite the simplicity of Camus's construction.

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