Albert Camus's novel The Plague, published in 1947, centers on the French-Algerian city of Oran, where thousands of rats are found dead in the streets. At first, only a few inhabitants take notice of this strange event—but soon, as the plague rushes through the city and begins to kill people, too, the nature and meaning of the disease can no longer be ignored. The Plague is probably my favorite novel by Camus; it ranks with other great existentialist/philosophical works of fiction, like Kafka's Trial, Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov, Sartre's Nausea, Dazai's No Longer Human, Malraux's Man's Fate, and so on.