Sagan's world is one of whisky-fuelled nights in smoky bars and nightclubs, of open-topped sports cars gliding through Paris at dawn or racing down open country roads, of white villas or beachfront hotels overlooking the blue Mediterranean, of lives sufficiently leisured to make relationships and the pursuit of pleasure their central focus. Like her contemporary Brigitte Bardot (and like Colette’s fictional Claudine), she was widely touted as a ‘girl of today’, but her novels were read and enjoyed for reasons that went well beyond effective marketing and mediatisation. Her success was in part the product of a new type of commercial publishing, itself one aspect of the accelerating consumerism of the 1950s, and of the decade's appetite for youth and novelty in the aftermath of defeat and humiliation. She was a highly mediatised star in France from her dramatic arrival on the literary scene in 1954, aged just 18, with the scandalous Bonjour Tristesse, and on through the following decades, remaining an instantly recognisable name and face up to and beyond her death in 2004. In the 1950s and ‘60s, Françoise Sagan's concise, elegant tales of love and disillusion, set among an affluent yet bohemian section of the French middle class, attracted a readership of millions both at home and abroad. The most successful middlebrow fiction captures, through compelling stories, some vital element of the mood, aspirations and anxieties of its era.

Bonjour tristesse kindle