Endearing, self-absorbed, seventeen-year-old Cecile is the very essence of untroubled amorality. Freed from the stifling constraints of boarding school, she joins her father--a handsome, still-young widower with a wandering eye--for a carefree, two-month summer vacation in a beautiful villa outside of Paris with his latest mistress, Elsa. Cecile cherishes the free-spirited moments she and her father share, while plotting her own sexual adventures with a "tall and almost beautiful" law student. But the arrival of her late mother's best friend, Anne, intrudes upon a young girl's pleasures....

Francoise Sagan is best known for her first novel, Bonjour Tristesse, which caused a scandal when she first published it at the age of eighteen in 1953. But her second novel, A Certain Smile, less shocking and more psychologically convincing, was preferred by many critics. Like Bonjour Tristesse, this story is set in Paris in the 1950s and told by a young student bored by her law books, restless and curious about love and sex. She is fond of her loyal boyfriend, but he, too, bores her. His worldly uncle strikes her as more exciting, appealingly risky and forbidden....