In this disturbing book, Giovanni Catelli seeks to solve the mysterious 1960 car crash that killed Albert Camus and his publisher, Michel Gallimard, who was behind the wheel. Based on meticulous research, he builds a compelling case that Camu--author of The Stranger, The Plague and The Myth of Sisyphus--was the victim of premeditated murder. Thus it was that the 46-year-old French Algerian philosopher, journalist and Nobel laureate was silenced--by the KGB.

The Russians had a motive: Camus had campaigned tirelessly against the Soviet crushing of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, denouncing the Bolshevik propagandist and Soviet foreign minister Dmitri Shepilov. He had also vociferously supported the awarding of the Nobel Prize to the dissident novelist Boris Pasternak, which enraged Moscow.

Sixty years after Camus' death, Catelli takes us back to a murky period in the Cold War. He probes the relationship between Camus and Pasternak, the fraught publication of Doctor Zhivago, the penetration of France by Soviet spies, and the high price paid by those throughout Europe who resisted the USSR.

Giovanni Catelli is a writer and poet, and an expert on cultural history behind the Iron Curtain. His short stories have appeared in the Corriere della Sera and La Nouvelle Revue Fran?aise. His books have been translated variously into Czech, Russian, Ukrainian, French and Spanish.