- 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.