Travel the world without leaving your chair.
If you are into contemporary fiction here are some contemporary fiction books from Belgium for the next part of the Read Around The World Challenge.
I lived everything daring those 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 Nothomb's critically acclaimed novel about a young girl who seems already stripped of illusions. The daughter of diplomats posted to Peking in the mid-seventies, she charges about the grim confines of the gated government enclave battling tirelessly against boredom, concocting a fantasy life as rich as her surroundings are bleak. During one of her tours of duty in a war that has broken out ... continue
The latest novel by France's "literary lioness" (Elle Magazine) tells the story of an orphan girl named--haplessly--Plectrude. Raised by an eccentric if loving aunt, she is a dreamy child who is discovered to have enormous gifts as a dancer. Accepted at Paris's most prestigious ballet school, Plectrude devotes herself to artistic perfection, until the body can take no more.