Bonjour Tristesse

Cécile is seventeen, spending the summer on the French Riviera with her charming, irresponsible father and his beautiful young girlfriend Anne. She has plans — not very serious plans, but plans that matter to her — and when Anne’s presence threatens to reorganise the summer into something more disciplined, more adult, and more moral, Cécile sets in motion a scheme that will destroy something she did not know she valued until it was gone.

Françoise Sagan wrote Bonjour Tristesse at eighteen, published it to enormous scandal in 1954, and produced in it one of the sharpest analyses ever written of the particular cruelty of adolescence — its combination of absolute self-absorption and complete unawareness of consequence. The prose is cool, precise, and slightly amused by its narrator, in the manner of the great French moralists.

A perfect short novel — one of those books that seems slight until you are halfway through it and discover you are completely held. The essential Sagan, now in a beautiful Penguin Modern Classics edition. Published by Penguin Modern Classics.