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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

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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

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"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" Katy Guest The Independent on Sunday

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Sarah Bakewell was a teenage existentialist, having been swept off her feet by reading Sartre´s Nausea , aged 16. She is the author of three biographies, including the bestselling How to Live: A Life of Montaigne , which won the Duff Cooper Prize for Non-Fiction and the National Books Critics Circle Award for Biography in the US, and was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award and the Marsh Biography Award.

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