An unfinished autobiographical novel, found among Camus's papers after his death and published only in 1994. It follows Jacques Cormery, who grows up in a poor family in Algiers, raised by a silent, nearly deaf mother and a grandmother, with his father lost in the First World War.
As an adult the narrator goes searching for traces of the father he never knew. The book is a tender portrait of childhood, poverty, school and the sunlit Algerian world that shaped Camus. It offers a warm and personal view of the author behind the famous philosophical works.