Fear and trembling - Amlie Nothomb

Winner of the Grand Prix de I'Academie Francaise and the Prix Internet du Livre, this taut tour-de-force of a novel created a sensation in France, where it has sold nearly half a million copies. FEAR AND TREMBLING tells the story of Amelie, a young Western woman who spends a year working at a Japanese corporation. She soon learns that at the Yumimoto Corporation hierarchy means everything. Keep to your place and you survive; break ranks and you will be broken. The determined but hapless Amelie makes mistake after mistake, not least of which is deigning to sympathise with her immediate superior, the beautiful, effcient and ice-cold Miss Mori. A perverse process of ritual humiliation follows. But even as Amelie's life at the Yumimoto Corporation spirals inexorably and hilariously downward, what she learns about herself and her colleagues in this brilliant novel will alternately delight and outrage readers. Not since Marguerite Duras has a novelist so indelibly marked the difference between East and West, and with such seductive honesty.