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

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

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