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The Blood of Others by Simone de Beauvoir

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The Blood of Others

by Simone de Beauvoir

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Length 10 hours 43 minutes

Language English

Narrators Hanako Footman, Rory Alexander & Ali Smith

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Summary
About the author

Brought to you by Penguin.

Potent and vividly emotional, Simone de Beauvoir’s captivating novel questions freedom and individual responsibility in the face of brutality

‘These carefree faces, on which we allowed our smiles to spread, were for others the mask of tragedy.’

Jean Blomart, patriot leader against the German forces of occupation, waits throughout an endless night for his wounded lover, Hélène, to die. Told through memories of his and her life, The Blood of Others paints an intense and moving picture of their love story and life in German occupied Paris during the Second World War. In the face of a seemingly unstoppable force, Hélène and Jean are confronted by the illusion of freedom and made to question their individual roles in the collective struggle against fascism, with devastating consequences.

First published in 1945, this powerful novel resonates profoundly today and brings the ideas of one of the most important existentialist thinkers to life in spellbinding prose.

© Simone de Beauvoir 1945 (P) Penguin Audio 2024

Classics Fiction Fiction - Literary

Simone de Beauvoir (1908-86) was a French philosopher, novelist and essayist, and the lifelong companion of Jean-Paul Sartre. De Beauvoir's first book, L'Invitée, was published in 1943. In 1945 she published Le Sang des autres, a novel dealing with the question of political involvement. De Beauvoir's breakthrough work was the semi-autobiographical Les Mandarins (1954), which won the Prix Goncourt. Roman Catholic authorities banned it and de Beauvoir's feminist classic The Second Sex (1949), in which de Beauvoir argued that "one is not born a woman; one becomes one".