In a wistful, tough, funny, clever, and characteristically odd memoir-cum-novel, Amelie Nothomb casts herself as hunger: hunger for experience, hunger for life, hunger for sweetness and, in what is the books nucleus, hunger for hunger (the period during which she was afflicted by acute anorexia).

The daughter of a Belgian diplomat, Amelie had an itinerant childhood, ranging from Tokyo to Peking and Paris to New York by way of Bangladesh. Recounting these formative journeys right up to her return to Japan in 1989, and the Kobe earthquake, The Life of Hunger is an extraordinary examination of the self, and perhaps Amelie’s most mature and moving work to date.