Apparently this was Camus's last novel, which he left unfinished through his tragic death in a car accident in 1960. It is much more than a fragment, since it runs to over 200 pages, with several additional pages of notes and drafts. What is chiefly remarkable is that the story is set in Camus's native Algeria, which was the subject he almost always wrote about best; he seems to have turned his back on the "intellectual" manner of The Fall and The Outsider - books which, in my own opinion, nowadays seem pretentious and deadly "literary". That he did not live long enough to complete it, while Sartre and de Beauvoir droned or hectored on for decades, is one of the dismal ironies of modern French literature.