Hey everyone!

La Chamade by Francoise Sagan is a 1965 contemporary novella that follows Lucille and Antoine in post-war Paris – two lovers who leave their older and richer partners so they can spend their days roaming the city, learning of each other and life.

I deeply enjoyed this book. Certainly La Chamade is an adult novel but it reads very much like a new adult contemporary; at its core it is a love story. Love is an ambivalent, evasive force in the translation I read of the novel. Sagan gives the young and beautiful Antoine and Lucille an irresistible kind of love that feels limitless and invulnerable. I think one of the reasons I enjoyed La Chamade so much is because of how simply happy the pair are – Sagan does something very rare in offering the reader a happily ever after in a modern romance story – (don’t worry this is no spoiler – the ending is refreshingly confusing). I certainly felt I was swept up in the glamour and pleasure of 1950s Paris, partly because of the author’s skill in world building but also because of the way love was intertwined with every cafe and street corner described. Sagan’s Paris is a romantic one.

I would recommend this book if you are looking for something that is luxurious, uplifting but also complex and challenging!

Keep on reading!

And thanks again Beth.