Covering the years after the Second World War and following on from Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter and The Prime of Life, the book tracks Beauvoir through postwar intellectual Paris, anti-colonial struggle, fame, exhaustion, her relationship with both political commitment and private life.

What makes this volume compelling is how unsentimental it is about its own myth. Beauvoir can be taken as a marble feminist monument, but here she shows who she really is. The memoir moves between travel, philosophical reflection, public scandal, existential doubt, and brutally lucid self-analysis. Sartre is present throughout, of course, but so too are Algeria, capitalism, celebrity intellectual culture, ageing bodies, and the slow erosion of certainty.

It also reads now as a document of twentieth-century intellectual life before theory became professionalised into academic performance. Beauvoir still believed ideas had material consequence. Even at her most self-critical, there is movement in the writing — a sense of thought trying to keep pace with a changing world and failing just enough to remain human.

Penguin paperback edition, 1968, translated from the French by Richard Howard. Moderate age toning and handling wear to wraps, with visible creasing and edge wear consistent with age; interior clean and remarkably well preserved for a 1960s Penguin paperback. A strong reading copy with excellent shelf presence.