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 Nothombs 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 lifes hardest rule: that if she wants to be loved, she must be cruel in return.

Poignant, provocative - and often hilarious - Loving Sabotage chronicles one girls precocious understanding of the struggles and pains of adult life.