Simply and elegantly narrated, Camus's 'The Stranger' tells the story of a French Algerian, Meursault, who murders an unnamed Arab on the beach in cold blood some hours after the man and some friends threatened him. Camus conceived of the tale as an everyday confrontation between a modern man and the absurdity of a society suffused with religion. In the courtroom Meursault's crime of seeming insufficiently bereft at his mother's death counts guarantees his death sentence by shocking the conscience of judges and jurors. But Kamel Daoud's 'The Meursault Investigation' (2013) returns the humanity to Meursault's victim and explores the murder in the context of French colonialism and Algerian resistance. Read in dialogue with Daoud's work, the verdict in 'The Stranger' seems less absurd and more inevitable, ordained by the 20th-century history of anti-colonialism.