Two slim novels full of glamour, restlessness, and emotional misbehaviour. Sold as a pair.

In A Certain Smile, a young Parisian student drifts into an affair with an older married man, and Sagan turns what could have been a simple scandal into something cooler, sadder, and much more exacting. It is one of her cleanest books about youth, boredom, vanity, and the way desire can make people feel both more alive and less real.

Lost Profile is later Sagan, and a little darker: a novel of money, dependence, escape, and the uneasy bargains people make with one another in order to be rescued, or merely rearranged. Together they show both ends of her gift — the early icy brilliance and the later, more bruised sophistication — without losing that unmistakable Sagan atmosphere of luxury, drift, and damage. 

Vintage Penguin paperbacks by Françoise Sagan. Lost Profile is the 1978 Penguin paperback, from Joanna Kilmartin’s English translation first published in 1976, A Certain Smile is a Penguin paperback reprint from 1975, from the English translation first published in 1956. Both in acceptable condition, reading copies and bring to the beach for sure.