Fear and Trembling

Amélie — young, Belgian, highly educated — arrives in Japan to begin her career at a large corporation in Tokyo. She makes a small error. Her superiors correct it. She makes a small attempt to compensate. Her superiors correct that. Each correction descends another level in the hierarchy, each level more humiliating than the last, until she reaches the bottom of the organisation performing the most menial function available. She accepts each step of her descent with a peculiar, passive complicity — which is either the deepest submission or the most complete contempt.

Amélie Nothomb’s Fear and Trembling — winner of the Grand Prix du roman de l’Académie française — is a short, wickedly sharp novel about the collision between Western individualism and Japanese corporate culture, told with the deadpan precision and dark comedy that make Nothomb one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary European fiction.

Perfect in its brevity — the ideal introduction to Nothomb’s remarkable body of work. Published by Faber & Faber.