Loving Sabotage

Description

'I lived everything during these three years: heroism, glory, treachery, love, indifference, suffering, humiliation. It was China, I was seven years old.' So announces the narrator of Loving Sabotage, Amelie Nothomb's critically acclaimed novel about a young girl already stripped of illusions. The daughter of diplomats posted to Peking in the mid-seventies, our unnamed narrator charges about her tightly enclosed world on her 'horse' (bicycle) with the dictatorial clarity and loneliness of a warrior-philosopher. 'From puberty onwards,' she announces at one point, 'life is just an epilogue.' There, on the asphalt-playground-battlefield, she discovers her first love: six-year-old Elena, her very own coldly indifferent 'Helen of Troy.' But she also learns life's hardest rule: that if she wants to be loved, she must be cruel in return. Poignant, provocative - and often hilarious - Loving Sabotage chronicles one girl's precocious understanding of the struggles and pains of adult life. A brilliant backlist novel from Amelie Nothomb, which will help maintain the momentum behind her work in the UK following the acclaim and success of The Book of Proper Names Her new novel, Antichrista, is published in August 2005

Belgian by nationality, Amelie Nothomb was born in Kobe, Japan, and currently lives in Paris. Described by Time Magazine as 'prolific and ingenious', she is the best-selling author of thirteen novels, translated into thirty languages. Fear and Trembling won the Grand Prix of the Academie Francaise and the Prix Internet du Livre. The Book of Proper Names was originally published in France, as Robert Des Noms Propres, where it has sold over 250,000 copies.

"Amelie Nothomb is such an utter astonishment, the shock of reading her for the first time is like realising you have missed a whole movement, or a century, in the scheme of things.' Scotland on Sunday