The impassioned correspondence between the Nobel Prize–winning author and the renowned Spanish French actress who appeared in his plays, tracing the extreme highs and lows of their all-consuming love affair--a bestseller in France, translated for the first time into English It’s said that the affair began on June 6, 1944, the day the Allied forces landed in Normandy. The twenty-one-year-old Casarès was starring in a production of the thirty-year-old Camus’s play Though their fling would be cut short by the end of the Occupation--and the return to Paris of Camus’s wife, Francine--the two were destined to meet again: four years later, to the day, they crossed paths by chance on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. Over the next twelve years, without interruption--until the car wreck of January 4, 1960, that stole Camus’s life--the author and actress would correspond furiously, their words swelling and shimmering and surging like the ocean.; Across 865 letters of immense and exquisite emotion, they cry and laugh and bicker and beg, make and break promises, talk Stendhal and Proust and Orwell, French theater, sickness, death, writer’s block, and, most of all, they pine--leaving behind a record of one of the great love stories of the twentieth century....

Autorentext
Born in Algeria in 1913, ALBERT CAMUS published The Stranger—now one of the most widely read novels of this century—in 1942. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957. On January 4, 1960, he was killed in a car accident. MARIA CASARÈS (1922–1996) was a Spanish-born French actress, known for her roles in the films Les Enfants du Paradis and Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, and in the plays of Shakespeare and Cocteau. SANDRA SMITH is a prize-winning translator of more than forty books, including works by Irène Némirovsky, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, and Guy de Maupassant. CORY STOCKWELL is the translator of Brigitte Giraud’s Live Fast.