{"product_id":"loving-sabotage","title":"Loving Sabotage","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003e''I lived everything during these three years: heroism, glory, treachery, love, indifference, suffering, humiliation. It was China, I was seven years old.'' \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSo announces the narrator of \u003ci\u003eLoving Sabotage\u003c\/i\u003e, 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 - \u003ci\u003eLoving Sabotage\u003c\/i\u003e chronicles one girl''s precocious understanding of the struggles and pains of adult life.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"MediaPlace","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57318959448446,"sku":"NW9780571226634","price":9.4,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0817\/1379\/1261\/files\/9780571226634.jpg?v=1778652274","url":"https:\/\/mediaplace.com\/products\/loving-sabotage","provider":"MediaPlace","version":"1.0","type":"link"}