The Inseparables cover art

The Inseparables

The newly discovered novel from Simone de Beauvoir

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The Inseparables

By: Simone de Beauvoir, Lauren Elkin - translator, Sylvie le Bon de Beauvoir, Deborah Levy - introduction
Narrated by: Rachel Bavidge
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

'Life without her would be death'

The lost novel from the author of The Second Sex.
The compulsive story of two friends growing up and falling apart.

INTRODUCED BY DEBORAH LEVY.

When Andrée joins her school, Sylvie is immediately fascinated. Andrée is small for her age, but walks with the confidence of an adult. Under her red coat, she hides terrible burn scars. And when she imagines beautiful things, she gets goosebumps... Secretly Sylvie believes that Andrée is a prodigy about whom books will be written.

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 they can't stay like this forever.

Written in 1954, five years after The Second Sex, the novel was never published in Simone de Beauvoir's lifetime. This first English edition includes an afterword by her adopted daughter, who discovered the manuscript hidden in a drawer, and photographs of the real-life friendship which inspired and tormented the author.

TRANSLATED BY LAUREN ELKIN. WITH AN AFTERWORD FROM SYLVIE LE BON DE BEAUVOIR.

© Simone de Beauvoir 2021 (P) Penguin Audio 2021

 Biographical Fiction Coming of Age Fiction Friendship Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Women's Fiction World Literature Biography

Critic Reviews

This 'lost' novel by a giant of 20th-century letters reads surprisingly like a French Elena Ferrante... Lauren Elkin's translation is undistractingly smooth
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
A succulent taster for those who don't know de Beauvoir's work and, for everyone else, a treat
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
A passionate and tragic autobiographical story
Gorgeously written, intelligent, passionate, and in many ways foreshadows such contemporary works as Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend
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)
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
[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
All stars
Most relevant
Reader beware: this book doesn’t have the afterword by Sylvie le Bon de Beauvoir. The story is otherwise brilliant, & the narration is wonderful, but it’s important to acknowledge that the product is not as advertised. I was looking forward to reading that part, & it’s the reason I got this version of the audiobook, rather than buying it elsewhere.

Not as advertised

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