'Late into the night we talked of love, of its complications. In my father's eyes they were imaginary. . . This conception of rapid, violent and passing love affairs appealed to my imagination. I was not at the age when fidelity is attractive. I knew very little about love.'
The French Riviera: home to the Beautiful People. And none are more beautiful than Cécile, a precocious seventeen-year-old, and her father Raymond, a vivacious libertine. Charming, decadent, and irresponsible, the golden-skinned duo are dedicated to a life of free love, fast cars and hedonistic pleasures. But then, one long, hot summer Raymond decides to marry, and Cécile and her lover Cyril feel compelled to take a hand in his amours, with tragic consequences.
Bonjour Tristesse scandalized 1950s France with its portrayal of teenager terrible Cécile, a heroine who rejects conventional notions of love, marriage, and responsibility to choose her own sexual freedom.

That Mad Ache , set in high-society Paris in the mid-1960’s, recounts the emotional battle unleashed in the heart of Lucile, a sensitive but rootless young woman who finds herself caught between her carefree, tranquil love for 50-year-old Charles, a gentle, reflective, and well-off businessman, and her sudden wild passion for 30-year-old Antoine, a hot-blooded, impulsive, and struggling editor. As Lucile explores these two versions of love, she vacillates in confusion, but in the end she must choose, and her heart’s instinct is surprising and poignant. Originally published under the title La Chamade , this new translation by Douglas Hofstadter returns a forgotten classic to English. In Translator, Trader , Douglas Hofstadter reflects on his personal act of devotion in rewriting Françoise Sagan’s novel La Chamade in English, and on the paradoxes that constantly plague any literary translator on all scales, ranging from the humblest of commas to entire chapters. Flatly rejecting the common wisdom that translators are inevitably traitors, Hofstadter proposes instead that translators are traders, and that translation, like musical performance, deserves high respect as a creative act. In his view, literary translation is the art of making subtle trades in which one sometimes loses and sometimes gains, often both losing and gaining at the same time. This view implies that there is no reason a translation cannot be as good as the original work, and that the result inevitably bears the stamp of the translator, much as a musical performance inevitably bears the stamp of its artists. Both a companion to the beloved Sagan novel and a singular meditation on translation, Translator, Trader is a witty and intimate exploration of words, ideas, communication, creation, and faithfulness.

A Certain Smile, Francoise Sagan's second book, after Hello Sadness, also was a bestseller in 1950s. It told about a student's love affair with a middle-aged man. Like Cécile, she is slightly bored of life, but she suddenly realizes that "some day I would die, that my hand would no longer touch the chromium rim, nor would the sun shine in my eyes." Another variation of the formula was presented in Aimez-vous Brahms? (1959), in which a young man falls in love with a middle-aged woman.
Although Sagan's works about love, marriage and rootless existence are classified often by male critics as entertainment, her earlier novels in particular deserve according to feminist critics more attention. The confessional tone of Bonjou tristesse has been considered a precursor in such writing by women from more recent years. Sagan once said that for her "writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm... Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters." Her style is classically cool, restrained, austere, continuing the tradition of the French psychological novel during the decade when noveau roman made its breakthrough. Like in the works of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Sagan's lonely characters are disappointed in personal relationships, and try the fill the passage of time with the pursuit of pleasure. The polite everyday speech reveales the aimlessness of their lives.

The novel was a succes de scandale for its depiction of a young woman breaking up her father's affair.
Cécile, the narrator of Bonjour tristesse, is a pampered teenager. She spends her summer holidays in the south of France in a villa. Cécile has failed her exams but Cyril, a young law student, is more interesting than books. Her forty-year-old father, Raymond, is widowed. His latest mistress Elsa is ousted by Anne Larsen, his late wife's friend. Anne works in fashion, and has come to stay for a short visit at the villa. "I feared boredom and tranquillity more than anything. In order to achieve serenity, my father and I had to have excitement, and this Anne was not prepared to admit." To provoke her father's jealousy, she asks Cyril and Elsa to pretend to be in love. Cyril wants to marry Cécile, and accepts the plan. Anne is in love with Raymond. Elsa represents to Raymond his lost years, but he sees in the beautiful and sober Anne a perfect wife and mother to Cécile. The plan works, Anne drives recklessly away from the villa, and dies in a car accident. Cécile returns with her father to Paris and leaves the summer, Cyril, and her youth behind. The world of the rich and beautiful is hollow, and the care-free existence is lost for ever.

Published when she was only nineteen, Françoise Sagan's astonishing first novel
became an instant bestseller. It tells the story of Cécile, who leads a carefree life with her widowed father and his young mistresses until, one hot summer on the Riviera, he decides to remarry - with devastating consequences.
In
Dominique, a young woman bored with her lover, begins an encounter with an older man that unfolds in unexpected and troubling ways. These two acerbically witty and delightfully amoral tales about the nature of love are shimmering masterpieces of cool-headed, brilliant observation.

La villa est magnifique, l'été brûlant, la Méditerranée toute proche. Cécile a dix-sept ans. Elle ne connaît de l'amour que des baisers, des rendez-vous, des lassitudes. Pas pour longtemps. Son père, veuf, est un adepte joyeux des liaisons passagères et sans importance. Ils s'amusent, ils n'ont besoin de personne, ils sont heureux. La visite d'une femme de cœur, intelligente et calme, vient troubler ce délicieux désordre. Comment écarter la menace ? Dans la pinède embrasée, un jeu cruel se prépare.
C'était l'été 1954. On entendait pour la première fois la voix sèche et rapide d'un « charmant petit monstre » qui allait faire scandale. la deuxième moitié du XXe siècle commençait. Elle serait à l'image de cette adolescente déchirée entre le remords et le culte du plaisir.

Paru en 1957

Chez les Maligrasse, éditeurs parisiens, on joue, on s’ennuie, on ment, on souffre. Et quand ils auront cessé d’aimer et qu’ils seront à nouveau seuls, ils repartiront à la chasse au bonheur.

'The sap had dried up; the sap, the incentive, the fever, the desire to do, to act, to act the fool, make love, create'
A middle-aged woman breaks with her handsome young lover; a placid husband is suspected of infidelity; and a dying man reflects on his extramarital affairs, in these tales of love and disillusionment from the author of Bonjour Tristesse.