Au Revoir, Tristesse: Lessons in Happiness from French Literature
Viv Groskop
(Abrams Press, £17.99, pp256)
On the telly in the 1980s, Groskop watched Françoise Sagan, accessorised with cigarette and angry pout, drive round Paris like a maniac. The novelist embodied an elusive feeling that the English teen was determined to claim for herself: le bien-être, “so much sexier and more exciting than the mealy-mouthed, goody-goody, Goop-esque ‘wellbeing’”. In the decades since, her quest has led her to French writers from Colette to Balzac; she shares their wisdom in this biblio-memoir, a book whose chic swagger is balanced by cleverness and some very Anglo self-deprecation.
The Lightness
Emily Temple
(Borough Press, £14.99, pp300)
A year ago, Olivia’s father left for a meditation retreat and never returned. Now, aged 15, she’s run away from home and retraced his steps to find herself at the Levitation Centre. Over the course of a summer, she bands together with a tight-knit trio of other girls eager to be inducted into the art of weightlessness. It all makes for a psychologically smart debut that swathes teen desire and friendship in dark mystery and mirth.
Chanel’s Riviera: Life, Love and the Struggle for Survival on the Côte d’Azur, 1930-1944
Anne de Courcy
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £10.99, pp304)
There’s doomy fascination to be had from the antics of the artists, writers and socialites who descended on the south of France during the 1930s and partied on as fascism swept across the continent. Except to snub them, they scarcely even noticed the influx of German Jewish refugees. Blending glittering social detail with meticulous wartime history, de Courcy crafts a compelling account of a chilling historical juxtaposition. Needless to say, Chanel herself does not come out of it well.
• To order Au Revoir, Tristesse, The Lightness or Chanel’s Riviera go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15
