Women, Paperback

A rediscovered classic from the author of For Two Thousand Years, this remarkable novel presents nuanced snapshots of love in the early twentieth century.

Stefan Valeriu, a young man from Romania who has just completed his medical studies in Paris, spends his vacation in the Alps, where he quickly becomes entangled with three different women. We follow Stefan after his return to Paris as he reflects on the women in his life, at times playing the lover, and at others observing shrewdly from the periphery.

Women's four interlinked stories offer moving, strikingly modern portraits of romantic relationships in all their complexity, from unrequited loves and passionate affairs to tepid marriages of convenience. In the same eloquent style that would characterize his later, more political writings, Mihail Sebastian explores longing, otherness, empathy, and regret.

Mihail Sebastian was born in Romania in 1907 as Iosif Mendel Hechter. He worked as a lawyer and writer until anti-Semitic legislation forced him to abandon his public career. Having survived the war and the Holocaust, he was killed in a road accident in early 1945 as he was crossing the street to teach his first class. His long-lost diary, Journal 1935-1944: The Fascist Years, was published to great acclaim in the late 1990s. His novel For Two Thousand Years was published in English in 2016.

Philip Ó Ceallaigh is a writer as well as a translator. In 2006 he won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. His two short-story collections, Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse and The Pleasant Light of Day, were short-listed for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. He lives in Bucharest.