The key themes of her work, for which she has won several literary awards, are the observation of women, intercultural issues, the interaction between history and individual destinies and 20th century totalitarian systems, and the interweaving of personal and historical memory.

The essay "employs a highly concrete method, starting with an analysis of facts and texts to identify movements and continuities, and to formulate her concepts".

In this biography—written in dialogue form in which Sarde seeks to reconstitute Yourcenar’s little-known childhood and youth—she starts "from the text to deconstruct the author in terms of both her individual destiny and as a part of a collective history.

Sarde won early attention for her first novel, Le Désir fou, which relates the journey of a destructive passion, drawing on the tormented history of the 20th century.

Constance et la cinquantaine, published in 2003, is a novel in email form, with as its central theme the arrival in their fifties of a group of women bound by their friendship.

), interweaving two stories: the narrator’s investigations across several countries and the fictionalized quest of a young Sephardi woman from Eastern Europe lost in the Nazi camps.