The Stranger follows the life story Meursault, an indifferent settler in French Algeria, who learns about the death of his mother and it has a strange effect on him. Back in Algiers, on the day after his mother's funeral, Meursault encounters Marie, a former secretary of his firm, and they begin to have an intimate relationship. He also befriends Raymond Sintès, a neighbor who is rumored to be a pimp. One weekend, Raymond invites Meursault and Marie to a friend's beach cabin and as they get into a fight with two Arabs, Meursault kills one of them. The story is divided into two parts, presenting Meursault's first-person narrative before and after the killing.

Considered a classic of 20th-century literature, The Stranger has received critical acclaim for its philosophical outlook, absurdism, syntactic structure, and existentialism.