Loving sabotage

'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).

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.