Albert Camus set much of his work in Algeria, where he grew up. The Stranger is the obvious starting point -- a short, disorienting novel set in and around Algiers that captures the blinding Mediterranean light and the moral emptiness of colonial society. The First Man, published posthumously, is more personal and more tender, drawing on his childhood in working-class Algiers.
The Writings of Isabelle Eberhardt offer a window into colonial Algeria through the eyes of a Swiss-Russian woman who converted to Islam, dressed as a man, and traveled the Saharan south in the early 1900s. Her prose is vivid and strange. In the Shadow of Islam collects some of her best Algerian pieces.
For the war of independence, Alistair Horne's A Savage War of Peace remains the definitive English-language account. It is long and detailed but essential reading if you want to understand modern Algeria. The war shaped everything -- politics, architecture, the relationship with France, the national psyche.
The Algiers Motel Incident by John Hersey is not about Algeria at all, but Assia Djebar's Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade is -- a fragmented, poetic novel that weaves women's oral histories with the French invasion and the independence struggle. Kamel Daoud's The Meursault Investigation reimagines the Camus novel from the perspective of the murdered Arab's brother, and reads as both a literary response and a meditation on postcolonial Algeria.
Brian Moore's The Magician's Wife is a fine historical novel set during the French conquest, following a woman brought to Algeria to help persuade a Saharan marabout to support the French cause. It captures the collision of cultures with intelligence and restraint.