Come now… Pocket Penguin is doing a great job, bringing classic authours in pocket classics, making ‘quality writing available for the price of a packet of cigarettes’, but can anything in paperback be called a book?

Summer in Algiers (ISBN 0-141-02214-0) is of course, a collection of essays – Summer in Algiers, The Minotaur and Return to Tipasa, and in so much as it qualifies as a “set of written, printed, or blank pages fastened along one side and encased between protective covers” it is a book. In as much as these essays are another insight into a the understanding of a literary genius, that Summer in Algiers is poetically imagistic and in as much as the his views on lucidity and of a “way of life” are a peek through the looking glass to The Stranger and his other works, this is more than a book.

“Near the villa there is a funicular railway, and we take a car down the hill into the working-class district of Belcourt, where Albert Camus, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, was brought up, and about which he wrote in an unfinished autobiographical novel, Le Premier Homme (The First Man).

The Camus family apartment at 93, Rue Mohammed Belouizdad (formerly the Rue de Lyon) is still there, above a photographer’s shop. There is nothing to commemorate the fact that a Nobel prize-winner lived here, but then Camus was a French Algerian, one of the European settlers they called the pieds noirs, and he was as critical of the Marxist revolutionaries of the FLN as he was of the French colonialists. But it does mean that the room in which he worked is very little changed, apart from a sticker in Arabic on the door, which reads ‘In the name of God and Mohammed his messenger’. It’s small, maybe 15 by 18 feet, with grey-blue French windows opening onto the street with its neatly clipped shady trees. It faces west and even now, in November, I can feel the force of a midday sun that must have made life unbearable in the long hot summers.” – Michael Palin