In this taut tour-de-force of a novel, an international bestseller, a young Western woman named Amelie 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, efficient 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 downwards, what she learns about herself and her colleagues in this brilliant novel will alternately outrage and delight readers.

Author Biography

Amelie Nothomb was born in Kobe, Japan, and now lives in Paris. Her previous works include "The Stranger Next Door" and "Loving Sabotage".