Bonjour Tristesse (French Edition) by Françoise Sagan is an internationally beloved classic that delves into the life of seventeen-year-old Cécile, an endearing yet self-absorbed teenager. Freed from the constraints of boarding school, she joins her father—handsome and still-young, with a wandering eye—for a carefree two-month summer vacation in a beautiful villa outside Paris with his latest mistress, Elsa. Cécile cherishes the free-spirited moments she shares with her father while secretly plotting her own sexual adventures with a “tall and almost beautiful” law student. The arrival of Anne, her late mother’s best friend, disrupts Cécile’s idyll, and when a relationship develops between the adults, Cécile and her lover devise a plan to keep them apart…with tragic, unexpected consequences.

Written with exquisite composition, Bonjour Tristesse is a wonderfully ambiguous celebration of sexual liberation. Sagan’s narrative is both sympathetic and powerfully unsparing, offering a nuanced exploration of a precocious teenager’s attempts to understand and control the world around her.