At the existentialist cafâe : freedom, being and apricot cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Karl Jaspers, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and

Shortlisted for the PEN Hessell-Tiltman PrizeParis, near the turn of 1932-3.

Three young friends meet over apricot cocktails at the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue Montparnasse.

They are Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and their friend Raymond Aron, who opens their eyes to a radical new way of thinking…‘It’s not often that you miss your bus stop because you’re so engrossed in reading a book about existentialism, but I did exactly that...

The story of Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus, Heidegger et al is strange, fun and compelling reading.

If it doesn’t win awards, I will eat my copy’ Independent on Sunday‘Bakewell shows how fascinating were some of the existentialists’ ideas and how fascinating, often frightful, were their lives.

Vivid, humorous anecdotes are interwoven with a lucid and unpatronising exposition of their complex philosophy… Tender, incisive and fair’ Daily Telegraph‘Quirky, funny, clear and passionate… Few writers are as good as Bakewell at explaining complicated ideas in a way that makes them easy to understand’ Mail on Sunday