In a wistful, clever and unusual novel, Amelie Nothomb casts herself as hunger: hunger for experience, hunger for life, hunger for sweetness and, in what is the book's nucleus, hunger for hunger (the period during which she was afflicted by acute anorexia). Recounting the formative journeys of her youth, from Tokyo to Peking to Paris to New York, "The Life of Hunger" is a brilliant and moving examination of the self, and perhaps Amelie's most mature and moving work to date.