Identity & Belonging

Explorations of self, belonging, and what it means to find your place.

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The Woman Destroyed

The Woman Destroyed

Simone de Beauvoir

The Woman Destroyed is a collection of three novellas exploring the emotional crises of women confronting ageing, betrayal, and the collapse of the lives they have built around others. In the title story, Monique, a middle-aged wife and mother, struggles to cope when her husband reveals his infidelity, forcing her to question her marriage and her own sense of self. The other stories portray women facing disillusionment, professional frustration, and the painful realization that their expectations have not matched reality. Through intimate diaries and first-person narratives, Simone de Beauvoir examines the ways women can lose their identities by defining themselves through their relationships, families, and social roles. The collection offers a powerful reflection on independence, self-deception, and the difficult process of rebuilding a life when familiar certainties disappear.

Three Strong Women

Three Strong Women

The story of three women who say no: Norah, a French-born lawyer who finds herself in Senegal, summoned by her estranged father to save another victim of his paternity; Fanta, who leaves a contented life as a teacher in Dakar to follow her boyfriend back to France, where his depression and dislocation poison everything; and Khady, a penniless widow put out by her husband's family with nothing but the name of a distant cousin in France. As these three lives intertwine, each woman manages an astonishing feat of self-preservation against those who have made themselves the fastest-growing and most-reviled people in Europe. In Marie NDiaye's stunning narration we see the progress by which ordinary women discover unimagined reserves of strength.

Adèle

Adèle follows Adèle Robinson, a married woman living in Paris with her husband and young son. Despite her comfortable middle-class life and successful career as a journalist, she is consumed by compulsive sexual behavior that threatens to destroy her family and sense of self. As she becomes increasingly unable to control her impulses, her carefully maintained public image begins to unravel, exposing the emptiness and dissatisfaction beneath her seemingly ordinary existence. Through Adèle’s struggles, Leïla Slimani examines desire, addiction, repression, and the pressures of conventional domestic life. Written in a stark, unsentimental style, the novel explores the tension between social respectability and private compulsions, questioning how well people can truly understand themselves and the hidden forces that shape their behavior.

About this theme

Books: 3
Countries: 72

Countries with this theme

Bosnia and Herzegovina

Congo, Democratic Republic

Dominican Republic

North Macedonia