Majestic, scurrilous and scabrous... Raven's novels are joyous in their characterisation, wit and erudition....truffling in the fertile fields of soldiery, academia, business, politics and publishing. Raven's world - the upper middle class and upper class - is peopled by some of the vilest, funniest characters in English literature.

A ready made cult waiting to be discovered

A truly powerful vision of evil and corruption. This is an achievement which can hardly be dismissed as mere entertainment

Exciting, sleazy, cynical and funny... Indulgently bizarre sex scenes rub shoulders with sharply observed human dilemmas and relentlessly exposed psychological and political manipulation

His world is as original and surrealist as P. G. Wodehouse's, an alligator swamp in the homely back garden where all manner of nasty things hatch out

This is fiction on a grand and ambitious scale. Inspires sensations of terror, nausea, bemusement and exhilaration

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

Elegantly translated... The Inseparables...is a rich and rewarding novella

[The Inseparables] distils subjects that would preoccupy de Beauvoir throughout her career... [and] will introduce some readers to the defining role Lacoin played in de Beauvoir's trailblazing life and career

[The Inseparables] explores the tension between familial duty, religious faith, and the unpredictability of love - both platonic and otherwise - masterfully

Brilliant

[A] rousing novel, elegantly translated by Lauren Elkin, Beauvoir becomes Sylvie, and Zaza is Andrée... the pair's splendour blazes out on every page

[An] exquisitely simple tale... The Inseparables invites us to cherish friendship, and how it makes and breaks us in a precarious and cruel world.

A short novel that will bring most to tears, it's loving, it's tender, it's heart wrenching and absolutely worth reading