On a cold bright day, fifteen year old Adriana Dunea wakes up to find that her world has transformed overnight. Her parents irritate her, school is a bore and her body is changing in ways she does not understand. As the seasons turn, she grows into a beautiful young woman, forges new friendships and falls in and out of love. Yet her days spent dreaming of romance and listening to the latest gramophone records in her provincial town swiftly come to an end when the sudden opportunity arises to move to Bucharest. Seduced by the charms of the ‘Little Paris of the East’, a chance encounter with the hot-headed composer Cello Viorin tests her attachment to her longstanding sweetheart, Gelu. In this witty, lyrical coming-of-age novel, Mihail Sebastian sensitively charts his heroine’s  journey of self-awakening as she discovers the limits of her freedom and strives to shape her identity as a woman.

The frustrated wife of a French-Tunisian plantation owner, a mysterious older woman, a world weary tomboy, an unhappy mistress, a Parisian factory worker destined for tragedy, an acrobat turned cabaret sensation – these are the women whose lives are linked by their relationship with one man – Ștefan Valeriu. Divided into four separate stories connected by one man, Women takes us from Ștefan’s amorous entanglements at an Alpine lake resort, to his life in Bucharest and Paris, as each of the women in his life opens up new worlds for him. Women is a hymn to love in all its forms, romantic or platonic, sometimes reckless, often glorious and always, ultimately, ephemeral.  Reviews: "He wonderfully captures the atmosphere of prewar Romania in all its complexity, all the beauty and the horror… I love Sebastian for his lightness, for his wit…” -- John Banville, BBC4‘It’s an edgy account of sexuality, desire, and the strictures of contemporary relationships... a compelling portrait of desire in its many convoluted manifestations.’ -- Kirkus Reviews, Kirkus Reviews‘..these concise stories... showcase Sebastian’s brilliant eye for emotional detail.’ --Publishers' Weekly ‘His prose is like something Chekov might have written – the same modesty, candour, and subtleness of observation.’ -- Arthur Miller“Nothing I have read is more affecting than Mihail Sebastian’s magnificent, haunting 1934 novel, For Two Thousand Years.” -- Phillipe Sands, The Guardian