On March 28, five days after the UK entered lockdown, The Guardian reported that sales of Albert Camus’ La Peste (The Plague) had seen an astonishing surge.
Penguin Classics had gone from shipping quantities of the novel in the low hundreds each month to the mid-thousands: in February 2019 just 226 copies were sold in the UK, whereas in March 2020, 1,504 copies were sold in a single week alone (Willsher, 2020).
The novel features a memorable conversation between two of its main characters, Dr Rieux, the doctor who raises the alarm over the plague, and Tarrou, a visitor to the town and volunteer in the fight against the epidemic.
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