Her most recent book is Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation (2012). Rachel Cusk is the author of Saving Agnes (1993), which won the Whitbread First Novel Award A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother (2001) and Arlington Park (2006), shortlisted for the 2007 Orange Prize for Fiction. Heather Lloyd was previously Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Glasgow, and has published work on both Bonjour tristesse and Francoise Sagan. Sagan went on to write many other novels, plays and screenplays, and died in 2004. Bonjour tristesse (1954), published when she was just 19, became a succes de scandale and even earned its author a papal denunciation.

Heather Lloyd has also written a new afterword for this edition.įrancoise Sagan was born in France in 1935.

In A Certain Smile, which is also included in this volume, Dominique, a young woman bored with her lover, begins an encounter with an older man that unfolds in unexpected and troubling ways.īoth novellas have been freshly translated by Heather Lloyd and include an introduction by Rachel Cusk. Now this fresh and accurate new translation presents the uncensored text in full for the first time.īonjour Tristesse tells the story of Cecile, 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 Paris, beautiful Dominique Vallon is involved with a young man, Bertrand Griot, until suddenly entering into an unwise week-long romance with his wealthy and married uncle, Luc Ferrand. However, this frank and explicit novella was considered too daring for 1950s Britain, and sexual scenes were removed for the English publication. A Certain Smile is a 1958 American drama film directed by Jean Negulesco, based on the book of the same name by Françoise Sagan. Sylish, shimmering and amoral, Sagan's tale of adolescence and betrayal on the French Riviera was her masterpiece, published when she was just eighteen.

A Certain Smile by Françoise Sagan