‘Good night, mon chéri. May tomorrow come quickly, and all the other days when you will belong more to me than to that damned play. I kiss you with all my might.’ —Albert Camus to Maria Casarès, June 1944

The affair between Albert Camus and Maria Casarès began in wartime, on 6 June 1944. Casarès was starring in a production of Camus’ play The Misunderstanding, and at an after-party hosted by Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, the actress and Nobel Prize-winning author embarked on a love affair that would unfold in hundreds of vivid and moving letters over 15 years.

Translated into English for the first time, these 865 letters reveal the impassioned heights and depths of Casarès and Camus’ relationship. They wax lyrical, they rage, they traverse Parisian streets and gaze upon the Luberon mountains, they discuss stardom and everyday life. Letters: 1944-1959 draws back the curtain on the intimate personal lives of two extraordinary artists, who wrote persistently and copiously to one another until Camus’ fatal car crash in January 1960.

[B]oth a major literary document on one of the greatest authors of our times as well as – thanks to the personality of his correspondent, an extraordinary actress – on the entire artistic life of their era, [and a] testimony to a mad love. Totally romantic, jubilant and agonized, but ending in tragedy * Livres Hebdo *
Incandescent … Until now, this collection has remained a fantasy object for Albert Camus specialists. Since, at home, the letter writer rivalled, in his clarity, the novelist * Le Monde des Livres *
Fabulous ... This correspondence, fired up by radiant love, transports us to the end * Libération *
Some of the greatest love letters since those of Abelard and Heloise … As we read, we realize that whatever we are learning from these long-dead lovers pales against what we can learn about ourselves. Read this book as a guide to loving and a guide to writing. Read it for sustenance after, as Casarès puts it, “one of those days when the heart weeps, despite all the hopes and joys that might be promised to it”. A dazzling correspondence from long ago, revived in ardent English. * Kirkus *

Albert Camus (1913-60) grew up in a working-class neighbourhood in Algiers. He studied philosophy at the University of Algiers, and became a journalist. His most important works include The Outsider, The Myth of Sisyphus, The Plague and The Fall. After the occupation of France by the Germans in 1941, Camus became one of the intellectual leaders of the Resistance movement. He was killed in a road accident, and his last unfinished novel, The First Man, appeared posthumously. Maria Casarès (1922–1996) was a Spanish-born French actress celebrated for her commanding presence on stage and screen. In 1942, she played the lead role on stage in Deirdre of the Sorrows by J. M. Synge and soon after launched her film career in Marcel Carné’s cinematic masterpiece Les Enfants du paradis. She went on to star in Robert Bresson’s Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne and gave perhaps her most memorable performance, as Death, in Jean Cocteau’s Orphée (1950).