Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails

At The Existentialist Café

From the bestselling author of How to Live, an enthralling and original new book about a group of young thinkers, the birth of existentialism and some of the biggest questions of all

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 while immersed in Sarah Bakewell's At the Existentialist Café. 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 proof copy

My book of the year is Sarah Bakewell’s At The Existentialist Café, a marvellously rich and evocative journey through one of the most powerful philosophical movements of the twentieth century… This graceful book speaks to our parochial and inward-looking age.

Times Literary Supplement, Book of the Year

A wonderfully readable combination of biography, philosophy, history, cultural analysis and personal reflection.

At the Existentialist Café takes us back to…when philosophers and philosophy itself were sexy, glamorous, outrageous; when sensuality and erudition were entwined… [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.

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.

Packed with out-of-the-way knowledge and has a cast of weird characters such as only a gathering of philosophers could supply.

[Bakewell] writes well, with a lightness of touch and a very Anglo-Saxon sense of humour… Bakewell is a skilful and nuanced teacher.  Her explanation of the mysteries of phenomenology, clear and succinct, is as brilliant as any I’ve heard in a French university classroom… Fascinating insights.

A book that is a kind of collaboration between [Bakewell’s] exhilarated younger self and the more measured, adult writer she has become… A work that is both warm and intellectually rigorous… Bakewell has not written a textbook — but anyone looking for one on phenomenology and existentialism would be advised to read this instead. She has a knack for crystallising key ideas by identifying choice original quotations and combining them with her own words… Her book is a clearing in a dense philosophical thicket few of us have the ability or inclination to navigate alone.

A surprisingly sparkling book… Interesting and amusing… Pleasant and entertaining.

At the Existentialist Café is a bracingly fresh look at once-antiquated ideas and the millennium in which they flourished… Ms. Bakewell’s approach is enticing and unusual.

Bakewell has a wonderful skill in expressing complex ideas in simple terms.

Enjoyable and authoritative group biography of the existentialist movement.

Bakewell has a gift for making philosophy come alive through an engaging blend of memoir, biography and cultural history.

A spritely and invigorating introduction to Sartre, de Beauvoir and Co. mixes philosophy, history and biography.

It is crammed with interest and rich in atmosphere. At its heart is a clear understanding of the relation between philosophy and biography.

Bakewell is a judicious quoter and lucid explainer. It is as rich and as satisfying as a slice of your granny’s fruitcake.

This beautifully written book is an enjoyable journey through a captivating if slightly naive and pretentious intellectual movement.

The most engaging work of philosophy I have read… Bakewell is brilliant at describing her philosophers’ sensibilities… Bakewell movingly celebrates thought itself as a sensual, passionate act… Bakewell is also very strong on the relationship between existentialism and the political and historical currents that shaped it.

A sort of collective biography, full of detail, and unexpected humour.

An intelligent, refreshingly witty history of existentialism

Bakewell’s smart, unconventional approach – snappy biographical details, telling anecdotes and a breezy prose style – makes it entirely accessible and wholly entertaining.

A strong, sometimes disorienting, case for the inextricability of philosophy and biography.

Impressively lucid descriptions… Deserves to be read.

Bakewell shows, in vivid and colourful prose, how the existentialists’ ideas were interwoven with their personal and political histories… In addition to being an excellent writer, Bakewell is also a very adept teacher. She affords her reader a refreshingly accessible introduction to some of Continental philosophy’s most daunting concepts.

Bakewell vividly recounts the exchanges, conversations and disputes… What greatly adds to the book’s charm is that it also reads as a personal intellectual memoir.

A wonderfully rich, informative, quietly learned and delightfully humorous study of a fascinating period in the troubled history of the 20th century. Bakewell finds just the right combination of enthusiasm, admiration and irreverence.

I’d warmly recommend At the Existentialist Café… She is always very readable.

[An] entertaining tour of existentialist ideas.

A rich, highly readable exploration of the mid-century Paris of Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre and their existentialist friends… Bakewell deftly weaves the colourful lives of these thinkers into stimulating explications of their ideas.

Sarah Bakewell is a skilful storyteller, effortlessly placing examinations of existentialist books and lectures within their personal and historical contexts… Bakewell packs a lot into a book that is readable and enjoyable throughout.

[A] wonderfully engaging and readable book… The book is a joy to read. Bakewell shows enormous skill in bringing to life not only the leading figures, but also the times and places in which they lived… There is an awful lot of research packed into it which extends far beyond the literary and philosophical writings of her chief protagonists.

A marvellous group biography… Complex philosophical ideas are limpidly examined amid gripping, juicy accounts of the thinkers’ remarkable lives.

This book is guaranteed to provide the reader with excellent material for a post-Christmas dinner debate.

Bakewell brilliantly illuminated how the ambitious philosophical analyses of a handful of writers have helped to shape the West’s cultural and political development since the war.

A book about existentialism may sound insufferably dry, but Bakewell writes with wit and verve and explains complex ideas with a light touch.

Sarah Bakewell pulls off the difficult feat of making Heidegger, Camus and Sartre accessible, while sprinkling the text with personal reminiscences. It is all carried off with an admirable lightness of touch too often missing from its subject.

Sarah Bakewell…has an ability to make complex ideas about comprehensible, entertaining and funny.

With this splendidly conceived and exquisitely written double biography - of both Montaigne the man and Montaigne the book - Sarah Bakewell should persuade another generation to fall in love with Montaigne

How to Live is a superb, spirited introduction to the master, and should have its readers rushing straight to the essays themselves

Sarah Bakewell has written a marvellously confident and clear introduction to Montaigne...a rare achievement. Sarah Bakewell deserves congratulations for opening Montaigne to new readers so very appealingly

Illuminating and humane book... It's rare to come across a biographer who remains so deliciously fond of her subject... How to Live will delight and illuminate

Bakewell writes with verve. This is an intellectually lively treatment of a Renaissance giant and his world

Sarah Bakewell had a wandering childhood, growing up on the "hippie trail" through Asia and in Australia. She studied philosophy at the University of Essex, and worked for many years as a curator of early printed books at the Wellcome Library, London, before becoming a full-time writer. Her books include How to Live: a life of Montaigne, which won the Duff Cooper Prize and the US National Book Critics Circle Prize, and At the Existentialist Café, a New York Times Ten Best Books of 2016. She was also among the winners of the 2018 Windham-Campbell Literature Prize. She still has a tendency to wander, but is mostly to be found either in London or in Italy with her wife and their family of dogs and chickens. 
www.sarahbakewell.com

Shortlisted for the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize 
 
Paris, 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

A Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer

How to Live

Part biography, part self-help, an original, funny and moving portrait of Montaigne, Renaissance nobleman and essayist.

With this splendidly conceived and exquisitely written double biography - of both Montaigne the man and Montaigne the book - Sarah Bakewell should persuade another generation to fall in love with Montaigne

How to live is a superb, spirited introduction to the master, and should have its readers rushing straight to the essays themselves

Sarah Bakewell has written a marvellously confident and clear introduction to Montaigne...a rare achievement. Sarah Bakewell deserves congratulations for opening Montaigne to new readers so very appealingly

Bakewell writes with verve.  This is an intellectually lively treatment of a Renaissance giant and his world

How to get on well with people, how to deal with violence, how to adjust to losing someone you love? How to live? 
 
This question obsessed Renaissance nobleman Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-92), who wrote free-roaming explorations of his thought and experience, unlike anything written before. Into these essays he put whatever was in his head: his tastes in wine and food, his childhood memories, the way his dog's ears twitched when it was dreaming, events in the appalling civil wars raging around him. The Essays was an instant bestseller, and over four hundred years later, readers still come to him in search of companionship, wisdom and entertainment - and in search of themselves. 
 
This first full biography of Montaigne in English for nearly fifty years relates the story of his life by way of the questions he posed and the answers he explored.

The Smart

The Smart is a true drama of eighteenth-century life with a mercurial, mysterious heroine. Caroline is a young Irishwoman who runs off to marry a soldier, comes to London and slides into a glamorous life as a high-class prostitute, a great risk-taker, possessing a mesmerising appeal. In the early 1770s, she becomes involved with the intriguing Perreau twins, identical in looks but opposite in character, one a sober merchant, the other a raffish gambler. They begin forging bonds, living in increasing luxury until everything collapses like a house of cards - and forgery is a capital offence. A brilliantly researched and marvellously evocative history, The Smart is full of the life of London streets and shots through with enduring themes - sex, money, death and fame. It bridges the gap between aristocracy and underworld as eighteenth-century society is drawn into the most scandalous financial sting of the age.

From King of Iceland to Tasmanian Convict

The English Dane

'A rollicking, roistering yarn about one of the most extraordinary adventurers of all time, written with the care of a true scholar adn the verve of a born storyteller. A triumph' - Magnus Magnusson

Bakewell is superbly matched to the task. Her account of the world encountered by Jorgenson is as rich and nuanced as her description of his life

Precise, amusing and intriguing. A vivid and moving portrait of an extraordinary but flawed man... A terrific book

Sarah Bakewell has a fine story to tell, and she is its skilled servant...A wonderful, intelligently told story

Splendid... An extraordinary story brilliantly told

This gripping nineteenth-century adventure stars Jorgen Jorgenson, who ran away to sea at fourteen and began a brilliant career by sailing to establish the first colony in Tasmania. Twists of fortune then found him captaining a warship for Napoleon before joining a British trading voyage to Iceland, where he staged an outrageous coup and ruled the country for two months. 
 
Much lay ahead, from imprisonment in the hulks to patronage by Joseph Banks and travels in Europe as a British spy. But Jorgenson was dogged by his own excesses, and ended up transported as a convict to the very colony he helped to found. Here he reinvented himself again as an explorer, and, despite his sympathy for the people, was caught up in the terrible Aboriginal clearances. Using unpublished sources and letters, Sarah Bakewell tells his astonishing tale with dazzling verve.

Sarah Bakewell

In this exhilarating handbook Sarah Bakewell explains that a humanist philosopher is one who puts the whole living person at the centre of things . . . Bakewell finishes this bracing book by urging us to draw inspiration from these earlier men and women as we try hard to live bravely and humanly in what sometimes seems like an aridly abstract and loveless world

A story of spiritual and intellectual triumph... An epic, spine-tingling and persuasive work of history

As in her previous books on Montaigne and the Existentialists, Bakewell manages to transform raw material into prose that is light and clear . . . she carefully selects only the most interesting and revealing details . . . Bakewell exemplifies the thirst for life and learning of humanism at its best

Engagingly written as well as richly informative . . . every thinker, every book, every movement is located lightly and precisely in relation to its past and its influence on the present day. I can't imagine a better history of humanism, nor one that is so vividly persuasive. Bakewell is a wonderful writer

An expansive tour of European humanism... Bakewell brings out sharply how much contrarian courage it took to stand up for secularism... These dangers are not a thing of the past... Humanism is not just a hard-won victory, as Sarah Bakewell documents, but a fragile one, threatened by theocracy and neo-facism, by politicians for whom the point of education is entirely economic, and by movements that aspire to leave humanity behind

I've long admired Sarah Bakewell's extraordinary talent for breathing life into philosophy, making vivid the historical circumstances that give birth to new ideas. And this book is her best yet - a fascinating, moving, funny, sometimes harrowing and ultimately uplifting account of humanity's struggle to understand and fully inhabit the state of being human

OLIVER BURKEMAN, author of Four Thousand Weeks

Humanly Possible skilfully combines philosophy, history and biography. She is scholarly yet accessible, and portrays people and ideas with vitality and without anachronism, making them affecting and alive

Impressively comprehensive... A highly engaging work

Bakewell has a contagious enthusiasm for many of these likeable figures . . . a jolly and readable skate through a large swathe of philosophical thought and practical endeavour

As she romps through the centuries, readers will feel assured that they are in the company of a gifted guide

A lifelong humanist, Bakewell traces the chequered but irresistible development of her convictions from the Renaissance to the present... [A] spirited book

Sarah Bakewell's books are always a joyous education . . . She combines a keen intellect with a lightness of touch and one always feels that she delights in sharing what she has learned. That delight is contagious. . . . the world looked different when I finished this book

ROBIN INCE, author of The Infinite Monkey Cage / The Importance of Being Interested

Fascinating . . . wonderfully learned, gracefully written, and simply enjoyable

NBCC Award winner Bakewell (How to Live) brilliantly tracks the development of humanism over seven centuries of intellectual history... Erudite and accessible, Bakewell's survey pulls together diverse historical threads without sacrificing the up-close details that give this work its spark. Even those who already consider themselves humanists will be enlightened

Bakewell crafts a history of humanism that's absorbing and accessible, as well as educational. Tracing its evolution, she celebrates its values and makes a persuasive argument as to why they're still needed today

A book of big and bold ideas... Bakewell is wide-ranging, witty and compassionate

Lively. . . [Bakewell's] new book is filled with her characteristic wit and clarity; she manages to wrangle seven centuries of humanist thought into a brisk narrative, resisting the traps of windy abstraction and glib oversimplification. . . She puts her entire self into this book, linking philosophical reflections with vibrant anecdotes. She delights in the paradoxical and the particular, reminding us that every human being contains multitudes

A book of big and bold ideas, Humanly Possible is humane in approach and, more important, readable and worth reading. . . Bakewell is wide-ranging, witty and compassionate

Bakewell brings her signature blend of wit and philosophical sophistication to the complex, sometimes contentious 700-year history of humanist thought . . . Bakewell is no stranger to the art of applying sophisticated philosophical thinking to the urgent business of daily life . . . for her, the essence of humanism lies not in grand ideas but the idiosyncrasies of individual experience

A spine-tingling, seamless account of 700 years of humanist thought

The great humanist experiment in living

The bestselling, prizewinning author of How to Live and At the Existentialist Café explores the great tradition of humanist writers, thinkers, scientists and artists, all trying to understand what it means to be truly human. 
 
*** THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER *** A BARACK OBAMA BOOK OF THE YEAR *** 
 
'I can't imagine a better history' PHILIP PULLMAN * 'Fascinating, moving, funny' OLIVER BURKEMAN 
 
If you are reading this, you may already be a humanist. Even if you don't know it. 
 
Do you love literature and the arts? Do you have a strong moral compass despite not being formally religious? Do you simply believe that individual lives are more important than grand political visions? If any of these apply, you are part of a long tradition of humanist thought. 
 
In Humanly Possible Sarah Bakewell asks what humanism is and why it has flourished for so long. By introducing us to the adventurous lives and ideas of famous humanists through 700 years of history, she shows how the humanist values that helped steer us through dark times in the past are just as urgently needed in our world today. 
 
‘An epic, spine-tingling and persuasive work of history’ Daily Telegraph 
 
‘As she romps through the centuries, readers will feel assured that they are in the company of a gifted guide’ The Economist

Sarah Bakewell

Praise for Humanly Possible

In this exhilarating handbook Sarah Bakewell explains that a humanist philosopher is one who puts the whole living person at the centre of things . . . Bakewell finishes this bracing book by urging us to draw ...

A story of spiritual and intellectual triumph... An epic, spine-tingling and persuasive work of history

As in her previous books on Montaigne and the Existentialists, Bakewell manages to transform raw material into prose that is light and clear . . . she carefully selects only the most interesting and reveal ...

In this exhilarating handbook Sarah Bakewell explains that a humanist philosopher is one who puts the whole living person at the centre of things . . . Bakewell finishes this bracing book by urging us to draw ...

A story of spiritual and intellectual triumph... An epic, spine-tingling and persuasive work of history

As in her previous books on Montaigne and the Existentialists, Bakewell manages to transform raw material into prose that is light and clear . . . she carefully selects only the most interesting and reveal ...

In this exhilarating handbook Sarah Bakewell explains that a humanist philosopher is one who puts the whole living person at the centre of things . . . Bakewell finishes this bracing book by urging us to draw ...

A story of spiritual and intellectual triumph... An epic, spine-tingling and persuasive work of history

As in her previous books on Montaigne and the Existentialists, Bakewell manages to transform raw material into prose that is light and clear . . . she carefully selects only the most interesting and reveal ...

Books by Sarah Bakewell

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter