A Very Easy Death has long been considered one of Simone de Beauvoir's masterpieces. The profoundly moving, day-by-day recounting of her mother's death 'shows the power of compassion when it is allied with acute intelligence' (Sunday Telegraph). Powerful, touching, and sometimes shocking, this is an end-of-life account that no reader is likely to forget.

First published in 1967, this book consists of three short novellas on the theme of women's vulnerability - in the first, to the process of ageing, in the second to loneliness, and, in the third, to the growing indifference of a loved one. 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.

The lost novel from the author of The Second Sex 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 VINTAGE FRENCH CLASSICS - five masterpieces of French fiction in gorgeous new gift editions. TRANSLATED BY LAUREN ELKIN - INTRODUCED BY DEBORAH LEVY

A captivating novella about long-term relationships, getting older and how to live a good life, by the great Simone de Beauvoir. 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.

'It is possible for man to snatch the world from the darkness of absurdity' How should we think and act in the world? These writings on the human condition by one of the twentieth century's great philosophers explore the absurdity of our notions of good and evil, and show instead how we make our own destiny simply by being. One of twenty new books in the bestselling Penguin Great Ideas series. This new selection showcases a diverse list of thinkers who have helped shape our world today, from anarchists to stoics, feminists to prophets, satirists to Zen Buddhists.

A superb autobiography by one of the great literary figures of the twentieth century, Simone de Beauvoir's Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter offers an intimate picture of growing up in a bourgeois French family, rebelling as an adolescent against the conventional expectations of her class, and striking out on her own with an intellectual and existential ambition exceedingly rare in a young woman in the 1920s.She vividly evokes her friendships, love interests, mentors, and the early days of the most important relationship of her life, with fellow student Jean-Paul Sartre, against the backdrop of a turbulent political time.

A Harper Perennial Modern Classics reissue of this unflinching examination of post-war French intellectual life, and an amazing chronicle of love, philosophy and politics from one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century. 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.

TRANSLATED BY CONSTANCE BORDE AND SHEILA MALOVANY-CHEVALLIER ANNOTATED AND INTRODUCED BY MARTINE REID 'Everyone who cares about freedom and justice for women should read The Second Sex' Guardian Simone de Beauvoir famously wrote, 'One is not born, but rather becomes, woman'. In this groundbreaking work of feminism she examines the limits of female freedom and explodes our deeply ingrained beliefs about femininity. Liberation, she argues, entails challenging traditional perceptions of the social relationship between the sexes and, crucially, in achieving economic independence. Drawing on sociology, anthropology and biology, The Second Sex is as important and relevant today as when it was first published in 1949.

"One of the most acute and thoughtful achievements of French fiction at mid-century." — New York Times

Set in Paris on the eve of World War II and sizzling with love, anger, and revenge, She Came to Stay explores the changes wrought in the soul of a woman and a city soon to fall. Although Françoise considers her relationship with Pierre an open one, she falls prey to jealousy when the gamine Xavière catches his attention. The moody young woman from the countryside pries her way between Françoise and Pierre, playing up to each one and deviously pulling them apart, until the only way out of the triangle is destruction.

"Behind the sympathy there is curiosity. . . . A writer whose tears for her characters freeze as they drop." — Sunday London Times

Simone de Beauvoir is the author of the landmark feminist work The Second Sex, as well as numerous other fiction and nonfiction books.

Includes the full French text, accompanied by French-English vocabulary. Notes and a detailed introduction in English put the work in its social and historical context.

The lost novel from the author of The Second Sex When Andree joins her school, Sylvie is immediately fascinated. Andree 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

Includes the full French text, accompanied by French-English vocabulary. Notes and a detailed introduction in English put the work in its social and historical context.

Vintage Feminism: classic feminist texts in short form WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY NATALIE HAYNES When this book was first published in 1949 it was to outrage and scandal. Never before had the case for female liberty been so forcefully and successfully argued. De Beauvoir's belief that 'One is not born, but rather becomes, woman' switched on light bulbs in the heads of a generation of women and began a fight for greater equality and economic independence. These pages contain the key passages of the book that changed perceptions of women forever. TRANSLATED BY CONSTANCE BORDE AND SHEILA MALOVANY-CHEVALLIER ANNOTATED AND INTRODUCED BY MARTINE REID

These three long stories draw us into the lives of three women, all past their first youth, all facing unexpected crises. In the title story, the heroine's serenity is shattered when she learns that her husband is having an affair. In "The Age of Discretion," a successful, happily married professor finds herself increasingly distressed by her son's absorption in his young wife and her worldly values. In "The Monologue," a rich, spoiled woman, home alone on New Year's Eve, pours out a lifetime's rage and frustration in a harrowing diatribe. Enthralling as fiction, suffused with de Beauvoir's remarkable insights into women, The Woman Destroyed gives us a legendary writer at her best.

Written as an act of revenge against the 17 year-old who came between her and Jean-Paul Sartre, She Came to Stay is Simone de Beauvoir's first novel - a lacerating study of a young, naive couple in love and the usurping woman who comes between them. 'It is impossible to talk about faithfulness and unfaithfulness where we are oncerned. You and I are simply one. Neither of us can be described without the other.' It was unthinkable that Pierre and Francoise should ever tire of each other. And yet, both talented and restless, they constantly feel the need for new sensations, new people. Because of this they bring the young, beautiful and irresponsible Xaviere into their life who, determined to take Pierre for herself, drives a wedge between them, with unforeseeable, disastrous consequences... Published in 1943, 'She Came to Stay' is Simone de Beauvoir's first novel. Written as an act of revenge against the woman who nearly destroyed her now legendary, unorthodox relationship with the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, it fictionalises the events of 1935, when Sartre became infatuated with seventeen-year old Olga Bost, a pupil and devotee of de Beauvoir's. Passionately eloquent, coolly and devastatingly ironic, 'She Came to Stay' is one of the most extraordinary and powerful pieces of fictional autobiography of the twentieth century, in which de Beauvoir's 'tears for her characters freeze as they drop.'

Newly translated and unabridged in English for the first time, Simone de Beauvoir's masterwork is a powerful analysis of the Western notion of "woman," and a groundbreaking exploration of inequality and otherness. This long-awaited new edition reinstates significant portions of the original French text that were cut in the first English translation. Vital and groundbreaking, Beauvoir's pioneering and impressive text remains as pertinent today as it was sixty years ago, and will continue to provoke and inspire generations of men and women to come.

"Salty, frank, and realistic." — San Francisco Chronicle

In her most famous novel, The Mandarins, Simone de Beauvoir takes an unflinching look at Parisian intellectual society at the end of World War II. In fictionally relating the stories of those around her — Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Arthur Koestler, Nelson Algren — de Beauvoir dissects the emotional and philosophical currents of her time. At once an engrossing drama and an intriguing political tale, The Mandarins is the emotional odyssey of a woman torn between her inner desires and her public life.

"Much more than a roman à clef . . . a moving and engrossing novel." — New York Times

• Winner of the Prix Goncourt

Simone de Beauvoir is the author of the landmark feminist work The Second Sex, as well as numerous other fiction and nonfiction books.

As the definitive study of the universal problem of growing old, The Coming of Age is "a brilliant achievement" (Marc Slonin, New York Times).

What do the words elderly, old, and aged really mean? How are they used by society, and how in turn do they define the generation that we are taught to respect and love but instead castigate and avoid? Most importantly, how is our treatment of this generation a reflection of our society's values and priorities?

In The Coming of Age, Simone de Beauvoir seeks greater understanding of our perception of elders. With bravery, tenacity, and forceful honesty, she guides us on a study spanning a thousand years and a variety of different nations and cultures to provide a clear and alarming picture of "Society's secret shame"-the separation and distance from our communities that the old must suffer and endure.

A poignant account of her mother's death from cancer.

Political Writings offers an abundance of newly translated essays by Simone de Beauvoir that demonstrate a heretofore unknown side of her political philosophy. The writings in this volume range from Beauvoir's surprising 1952 defense of the misogynistic eighteenth-century pornographer, the Marquis de Sade, to a co-written 1974 documentary film, transcribed here for the first time, which draws on Beauvoir's analysis of how socioeconomic privilege shapes the biological reality of aging. The volume traces nearly three decades of Beauvoir's leftist political engagement, from exposes of conditions in fascist Spain and Portugal in 1945 and hard-hitting attacks on right-wing French intellectuals in the 1950s, to the 1962 defense of an Algerian freedom fighter, Djamila Boupacha, and a 1975 article arguing for what is now called the "two-state solution" in Israel. Together these texts prefigure Beauvoir's later feminist activism and provide a new interpretive context for reading her multi-volume autobiography, while also shedding new light on French intellectual history during the turbulent era of decolonization.

In her memoirs, Simone de Beauvoir created a remarkable portrait of a twentieth-century woman’s struggle for independence.

In Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter she describes her early life, from her birth in Paris, 1908, to her student days at Sorbonne, where she met Jean-Paul Sarte – ‘the dream-companion I had longed for since I was fifteen’. Full of the most intimate detail and a true sense of discovery, it is a revealing account of her early development as a writer through her initial acceptance and then courageous defiance of the social conventions of her bourgeois family and class. An inspirational and often controversial figure, Simone de Beauvoir remains a powerful icon of early feminism.