Saturnine Puissant se présente à une offre de colocation. Sur place, elle apprend que le propriétaire multiplie les conquêtes mais que ces dernières disparaissent. Saturnine s'installe néanmoins, tombe sous le charme de don Elemirio et découvre que l'homme cryogénise ses femmes. Un clin d'oeil au conte de Perrault, entre humour, suspense et analyse des sentiments.

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.

The Japanese believe that until the age of three, children are gods, each one an okosama, or 'Lord Child'. On their third birthday they fall from grace and join the rest of mankind. Narrated by a child — from the age of two and a half up until her third birthday — this novel reveals how this fall from grace can be a very difficult thing indeed from which to recover. 'Nothomb potently distils from the state of infancy the intensity of beginnings, the precariousness, the trailed clouds of glory — that grow indistinct as childhood approaches.' New York Times. 'Amélie Nothomb, like an urchin about to pick your pocket, has frighteningly clear eyes and a disarming voice with a wicked snap.' Luc Sante