Smaller isn't always better, but sometimes power is best contained in miniature. "The Book of Proper Names" is a slim volume packed with wit, imagination and cleverly spun characters. Belgian writer Amélie Nothomb, once deemed France's "literary lioness," captivates with her sharp description and delicate control over the story of Plectrude, a fairy-tale name for an otherworldly girl who doesn't quite belong.

Nothomb's portrait of the freedom of childhood and the haunting confusion of adolescence is at once charming and brutal. Plectrude's life is marked by changes in body, soul, connections to friends and parents, and her place in the world, and though she may be unlike us, she struggles and suffers for what is at the core of each of our lives.

Nothomb's darkly satirical novellas, most of them unashamedly semi-autobiographical, are bestsellers in France, and this is a disturbing, fantastical moral tale for our times. Plectrude's adolescent years as an anorexic in a brutal ballet school, where the girls exercise until they ache and are encouraged to starve themselves, are extraordinarily vivid. "Here there was no tenderness in the eyes of the adults," Nothomb writes, "merely a scalpel to slice away the last slice of childhood." With the loss of weight, Plectrude also loses feeling, until she starves herself of so much calcium that she breaks her leg and is told by the doctors that she can never dance again.

There is a poetic, elliptical quality to Nothomb's sparse, precise prose. She captures the crucial aspects of growing up with a light yet darkly comic touch; first crushes, fascination with death, the need for a destiny, the disillusionment with parents - it's all here. But so, too, is the troubled symbiosis between childhood and adolescence, and the acute agony for both mother and daughter when the child who was raised as a princess becomes an ugly disappointment as a teenager.

She has 12 novels in print around the world, so it is astonishing that British publishers haven't discovered Nothomb's perverse, wacky wit and fertile imagination before now. But for me it is her astute understanding of growing up and the damage done by mothers who see their daughters merely as extensions of themselves that has left its mark.