Nicole and André, a retired French couple, take a summer holiday to Russia. It is the 1960s and Russia is a beautiful, complicated place. Their guide is Macha, André’s daughter from a previous relationship – a woman they both love. Adventure, inspiration, good food and good vodka are promised.

Once thrilled by their romance, Nicole and André have now become too used to each other. Both harbour a growing feeling of not being fully understood – of being alone. Father and daughter engage in the grand debates of East-West relations, nationalism and socialism. But getting older, long-term relationships and how to enjoy life turn out to be the more pressing issues.

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.

TRANSLATED BY LAUREN ELKIN – INTRODUCED BY DEBORAH LEVY

‘Slim, elegant, achingly tragic and unaffectedly lovely in its evocation of the closeness between girls – and the pressures that sunder them’ Spectator

‘There were lines that absolutely punched me in the gut’ Anbara Salam

‘Gorgeously written, intelligent, passionate’ Oprah Daily

‘Elegantly translated…a rich and rewarding novella’ Literary Review

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.

‘Gorgeously written, intelligent, passionate, and in many ways foreshadows such contemporary works as Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend’ Oprah Daily

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

THE WOMAN DESTROYED is a collection of three stories, each an exquisite and passionate study of a woman trapped by circumstances, trying to rebuild her life.

In the first story, ‘The Age of Discretion’, a successful scholar fast approaching middle age faces a double shock – her son’s abandonment of the career she has chosen for him and the harsh critical rejection of her latest academic work. ‘The Monologue’ is an extraordinary New Year’s Eve outpouring of invective from a woman consumed with bitterness and loneliness after her son and her husband have left home. Finally, in ‘The Woman Destroyed’, Simone de Beauvoir tells the story of Monique, trying desperately to resurrect her life after her husband confesses to an affair with a younger woman.

Compassionate, lucid, full of wit and knowing, Simone de Beauvoir’s rare insight into the inequalities and complexities of women’s lives is unsurpassable.

An epic romance, a philosophical argument and an honest and searing portrayal of what it means to be a woman, this is Simone de Beauvoir’s most famous and profound novel. De Beauvoir sketches the volatile intellectual and political climate of post-war France with amazing deftness and insight, peopling her story with fictionalisations of the most important figures of the era, such as Camus, Sartre and Nelson Algren. Her novel examines the painful split between public and private life that characterised the female experience in the mid-20th century, and addresses the most difficult questions of gender and choice.

It is an astonishing work of intellectual athleticism, yet also a moving romance, a love story of passion and depth. Long out of print, this masterpiece is now reissued as part of the Harper Perennial Modern Classics series so that a whole new generation can discover de Beauvoir’s magic.