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Simone de Beauvoir (Author) Simone de Beauvoir was born in Paris in 1908. In 1929 she became the youngest person ever to obtain the agregation in philosophy at the Sorbonne, placing second to Jean-Paul Sartre. She taught at the lycees at Marseille and Rouen from 1931-1937, and in Paris from 1938-1943. After the war, she emerged as one of the leaders of the existentialist movement, working with Sartre on Les Temps Mordernes. The author of several books including The Mandarins (1957) which was awarded the Prix Goncourt, de Beauvoir was one of the most influential thinkers of her generation. She died in 1986. Deborah Levy (Introducer) Deborah Levy was born in 1969, studied theatre at Dartington College of Arts, and now lives in London. Her plays include Pax, which City Limits considred 'remarkable for its combination of intellectual rigour, poetic fantasy and visual imagination' and Heresies for the Royal Shakespeare Company, 'An ambitious, imaginative, sometimes funny, sometimes touching, passage across a terrain where moral parables and folk fancies meet' (Marina Warner, Independent). She has also published a collection of short stories, Ophelia and the Great Idea, and a novel, Beautiful Mutants, and, most recently, Swallowing Geography, all of which are published by Vintage. Lauren Elkin (Translator) Lauren Elkin is the author of several books, including Fl neuse- Women Walk the City. Her co-translation (with Charlotte Mandell) of Claude Arnaud's biography of Jean Cocteau won the 2017 French-American Foundation's translation award. After twenty years in Paris, she now lives in London.
Gorgeously written, intelligent, passionate, and in many ways foreshadows such contemporary works as Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend * Oprah Daily * A passionate and tragic autobiographical story * Vanity Fair * 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 * [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 * In Lauren Elkin's fine translation, the lucid, sculpted prose can flare into starbursts of introspective sensuality. It touches and grips not just as a portrait of semi-requited teenage ardour...but because Beauvoir gives the torments of belief their due... Its focus and restraint show that, even in maturity, Beauvoir could write like a dutiful daughter of the French classics -- Boyd Tonkin * The Times *
