Dr Tony Shaw

Tuer le père (literally 'Killing the Father') is Amélie Nothomb's latest work, although Barbe-Bleue ('Bluebeard' as...

'At thirty she survived the death of her husband. She's now forty and a bastard in a three-piece suit is systematically destr...

In English this is  The Book of Proper Names , but much is missed in the translation of this title. At the age of nineteen Lucette...

Perhaps only four or five of Amélie Nothomb's novels can be classed as what the French term ' autofiction ', but all of them...

Acide sulfurique is probably the strongest social criticism Amélie Nothomb has so far made, and it is significant - bearing in mind tha...

Attentat is yet another Amélie Nothomb story which is very different from what she's done before, although several motifs remain fro...

At the center of the brief novel Le voyage d'hiver ( Winter Journey ) is the relationship between Zoïle, Astrolabe, and Aliénor. Zoï...

In several of her novels, Amélie Nothomb mentions Alexandre ('I'm a notoriously unknown writer') Vialatte in passing. He was ...

Les combustibles (1994) – which is entitled Human Rites in the English translation – is a play set in a freezing besieged town in an u...

 Cosmétique de l'ennemi begins in a flight departure lounge where a delay is announced, and Jérôme Angust settles down to read a bo...

 On the back cover of Le fait du prince is a quotation from it: ' Il y a un instant, entre la quinzième et la seizième gorgée de c...

 Mercure  takes place in 1923, and is almost wholly set on the tiny imaginary island of Mortes-Frontières, just off the Cherbourg penin...

The work of Georges Bernanos - and his conception of evil in particular - is a very strong influence on Amélie Nothomb: in Antéchrista ...

Métaphysique des tubes (2000)   is a reconstruction of the first three years of Amélie Nothomb's life, and I have said a few words...