Bonjour Tristesse

Cécile is seventeen, sun-browned, and bored in the most exquisite way. She spends the summer on the Riviera with her widowed father and his latest mistress, swimming, flirting, and treating other people's emotions as a game. Then her father's fiancée arrives — Anne, poised and serious — threatening to impose order on their beautiful disorder. Cécile's manipulation begins as sport and ends as tragedy. Sagan was eighteen when she wrote this, and the novel has the same quality as the summer it describes: brief, dazzling, and gone before you understand what happened. The Côte d'Azur has never looked more seductive or more lethal.