Hello Sadness: Bonjour Tristesse

This first novel by Francoise Sagan was awarded the Grand Prix des Critiques and is an International best seller .Told in the first person, it is the story of a girl who has just left school to live with her father an attractive widower, a sophisticated hedonist , who can not exist without his women friends. Their carefree existence is changed when a friend of the girl's dead mother comes to stay, falls in love with the father and decides to marry him and thus ensure a respectable bourgeois life for both father and daughter. The crisis of the story is contained in the impact of these two characters: The elegant, charming woman, who believes in a more ordered way of life, and the girl who admirers her, but who is determined to maintain their freedom that she finds herself opposed the marriage. In the working out of the situation the author, who was only eighteen when she wrote the book, shows remarkable perception and subtlety in handling a most complex emotional situation.