And none are more beautiful than Cécile, a precocious seventeen-year-old, and her father Raymond, a vivacious libertine. The French Riviera: home to the Beautiful People. I was not at the age when fidelity is attractive. This conception of rapid, violent and passing love affairs appealed to my imagination. ‘Late into the night we talked of love, of its complications. RELATED: Review: When Breath Becomes Air - Paul Kalanithi Bonjour Tristesse by Fraçoise Sagan Summary

A holiday romance ensues with “tall and almost beautiful” law student Cyril, who becomes entangled in a plot Cecil concocts to stop the impending wedding between her father and late mother’s best friend.Ī subtle, rousing tale with tragic consequences, Bonjour Tristesse is plentiful in poetic prose and resonates as much with readers today as it did on its first publication over sixty years ago. Seventeen-year-old Cecil is holidaying on the Côte d’Azur with her widowed father and his mistress and is enjoying the freedom afforded to her now she’s no longer confined to the four walls of boarding school.

An amoral tale of a heady summer set on the French Riviera, this fast-paced novella scandalised French society and soon brought fame to its young author.

Translated as ‘Hello Sadness’, Bonjour Tristesse was written by seventeen-year old Françoise Sagan published in 1954 when the author was just seventeen, it immediately became an overnight sensation. The book is certainly more handbag-friendly than my copy of Middlemarch – which has been wrongly mistaken for the Bible on more than one occasion. Originally bought from Atlantis Books while on holiday in Santorini a few weeks previously, the shop itself is a haven for book lovers tucked away in a white-washed cave-like building on a side street in Santorini, I could have spent my entire holiday perusing the well-stocked shelves, but instead settled for an hour in the early evening sun, leaving with just one of the bookseller’s recommendations. Thankfully, I had packed Bonjour Tristesse. On the second leg of my journey to Sydney, having finished Middlemarch at Beijing Aiport, I was in dire need of a quick, compelling read that would entertain me for the final couple of hours of my flight.

Bonjour tristesse by Françoise Sagan