The Inseparables
The newly discovered novel from Simone de Beauvoir
Simone de Beauvoir author Lauren Elkin translator Deborah Levy editor
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Vintage Publishing
Published:2nd Jun '22
Should be back in stock very soon
This paperback is available in another edition too:
- Paperback£9.99(9781784878467)

When Andrée joins her school, Sylvie is immediately fascinated. Andrée is small for her age but walks with the confidence of an adult.
The girls become close. They talk for hours about equality, justice, war and religion; they lose respect for their teachers; they build a world of their own. But as the girls grow into young women, the pressures of society mount, threatening everything.
This novel was never published in Simone de Beauvoir's lifetime. It tells the story of the real-life friendship that shaped one of the most important thinkers and feminists of the twentieth century.
'Slim, elegant, achingly tragic and unaffectedly lovely in its evocation of the closeness between girls - and the pressures that sunder them' Spectator
TRANSLATED BY LAUREN ELKIN - INTRODUCED BY DEBORAH LEVY
This 'lost' novel by a giant of 20th-century letters reads surprisingly like a French Elena Ferrante... Lauren Elkin's translation is undistractingly smooth * Daily Telegraph *
Translated by Lauren Elkin with exquisite finesse, it utterly conveys both de Beauvoir's heady sensuality and its immediate opposite, observant restraint... The Inseparables is a ravishing work of art * Financial Times *
A succulent taster for those who don't know de Beauvoir's work and, for everyone else, a treat * Daily Mail *
A poignant and sensitive portrait of female friendship which acutely captures the agonizing mysteries of intimacy. The translation was gorgeous, and there were lines that absolutely punched me in the gut -- Anbara Salam author of Belladonna
Slim, elegant, achingly tragic and unaffectedly lovely in its evocation of the closeness between girls - and the pressures that sunder them * Spectator *
A passionate and tragic autobiographical story * Vanity Fair *
Gorgeously written, intelligent, passionate, and in many ways foreshadows such contemporary works as Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend * Oprah Daily *
Here is an attentive and unintimate love, one that relishes the idea of imagining, but never knowing and never delimiting, the infinite expanses of another person's mind -- Merve Emre * New Yorker *
In Lauren Elkin's fine translation, the lucid, sculpted prose can flare into starbursts of introspective sensuality... Its focus and restraint show that, even in maturity, Beauvoir could write like a dutiful daughter of the French classics * The Times *
[An] absorbing novel... The Inseparables is a moving coming-of-age tale about two girls battling with who and what they want to be in 20th-century Paris * Monocle *
ISBN: 9781784877187
Dimensions: 198mm x 130mm x 13mm
Weight: 148g
176 pages