Loving Sabotage

At San-Li Tun, an elite Chinese school for diplomatic children in Beijing in the 1970s, the children of foreign embassies form their own closed world with its own hierarchies, its own cruelties, and its own peculiar social rituals. Amélie Nothomb — Belgian, privileged, chronically unable to conform — narrates her years in this world with her characteristic combination of self-deprecating humour and precise psychological observation, tracing the escalating logic of collective cruelty and the particular survival mechanisms of a child who is constitutionally incapable of fitting in.

Loving Sabotage is among Nothomb’s most autobiographical novels, and among her funniest — a portrait of childhood exile that manages to be simultaneously a comedy of manners and a disturbing account of how social worlds form and enforce themselves. The prose is as sharp as a knife and as light as feathers.

Ideal for readers who love Nothomb’s Fear and Trembling and want to understand where her sensibility comes from. Published by Faber & Faber.