Xiaolu-Guo

Reading lists

Where to start reading Xiaolu Guo

Chronicle of a Year by the Sea

My Battle of Hastings

This is a beautiful, witty meditation on cultural cross-pollination on the English coast, and the meaning of home and history for a wandering artist

Xiaolu Guo is currently one of the finest stylists writing in English. She is also one of the most insightful analysts of Englishness. This book’s curiosity about the history, geography and everyday life of Hastings, and its intimate, often melancholic confessions about living there as an outsider, make it both a haunting contribution to debates about the state of the nation and a moving, intensely personal account of acquiring a sense of place.

'As sharp and fresh as the wild garlic the author forages. A book to share and savour, bright and brilliant against the grey, grim post-Brexit, xenophobic times within and against which Guo writes.'

'With the eye of a filmmaker and the soul of a poet, Xiaolu transforms every experience into something thrilling and unique. It never ceases to amaze me how beautifully and imaginatively she organises the world around her, the collisions between cultures, between the inner life and outer, into her own philosophical quest. One of the most alchemical writers of our time.'

'Every time Xiaolu Guo publishes a new book I devour it immediately, and My Battle of Hastings was no exception. This is urgent, compelling, but also delightful writing, a book about war unlike any you'll ever read. Guo writes with a lightness of touch that belies the seriousness of her subject. How does she do it?'

‘Moving, delicate, and bracing, My Battle of Hastings combines personal and local histories with rigour and yet remains compulsively readable.’

Guo’s… form of life-writing is not merely personal, but aims to be political, foundational and future-forward, in a vibrant, varied tradition that includes Deborah Levy’s The Cost of Living series, the auto-fiction of Annie Ernaux… Virginia Woolf would be proud

There is nobody quite like Xiaolu Guo… She is a uniquely determined writer, documenting her quest to live life on her own terms… With My Battle of Hastings, Guo shows us the effort that it takes to truly put down roots in a culture so different from the one she was born into

A meditation not only on how history has shaped Hastings, but also on what it means to locate oneself within history

Guo’s delightfully frank and often moving memoir is also a poignant exploration of identity and belonging

Xiaolu Guo was born in China. She published six books before moving to Britain in 2002. Her books include: Village of Stone, shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize; A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, shortlisted for the Orange Prize; and I Am China. Her recent memoir, Once Upon a Time in the East, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award and the Rathbones Folio Prize 2018. It was a Sunday Times Book of the Year. Her most recent novel A Lover's Discourse was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize 2020. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a visiting professor at the Free University in Berlin.

‘This is urgent, compelling but also delightful writing’ Lauren Elkin 
 
In the depths of winter, Xiaolu Guo moves into a tiny dilapidated flat on the Hastings seafront – a room of her own where she can spend time writing, liberated from her domestic responsibilities in London. 
 
She immerses herself in the English landscape and its past and becomes preoccupied by the violence between Normans and Saxons. Filled with profound, beautiful and wry reflections on war, history, migration and belonging My Battle of Hastings is a chronicle of Xiaolu’s life in Hastings and a portrait of a dislocated artist seeking to connect with her local environment in the hope of finding a deeper connection to her adoptive nation. 
 
'Magnificent, brutal and poetic' Iain Sinclair 
 
‘There is nobody quite like Xiaolu Guo… With My Battle of Hastings, Guo shows us the effort that it takes to truly put down roots in a culture so different from the one she was born into’ The Times

A Life of My Own

Radical

When it comes to spinning light and shadow on the complexities of living, loving and language, Xiaolu Guo is one of the most valuable writers in the world

An etymological voyage that lives up to its title: radical in angle of attack, smart and brave. Making the urban condition of restlessness and pain into poetry

IAIN SINCLAIR, author of The Gold Machine

A wild, passionate, gorgeous book, wandering the borders of language and desire; walking cities and remembering the ghosts of past landscapes. Xiaolu Guo's books always open up new connections and curiosities for me. She is certainly among my favourite contemporary writers

Xiaolu Guo is a writer like no other, and this is a memoir like no other

RANA MITTER, Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China, University of Oxford

Xiaolu Guo is a writer like no other, and this is a memoir like no other. Organised through a series of words that cut across languages, the book shows the divides and the connections that define a life lived between China, Europe and America, all explained with wit, lightness of touch and the occasional pinch of heartbreak

Guo's writing is tender and raw, and she creates a passionate, intimate vocabulary, exploring the complexity of belonging, nostalgia, and love

[A] marvellous new memoir... [an] intellectually rich and stimulating journey

A collection of poetic thoughts of what it means to belong... she [Guo] writes beautifully

This book is so radically alive to everything that I could have sworn I felt it pulsating in my hands.

More than a memoir, it is as much about the skilful exploration of language as it is about a woman stepping outside her world, taking risks in a new territory

The new memoir from prize-winning writer and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo - playful, provocative and original, it's her deeply personal take on striving for a life of her own 
 
'When it comes to spinning light and shadow on the complexities of living, loving and language, Xiaolu Guo is one of the most valuable writers in the world' DEBORAH LEVY 
 
The world can seem strange and lonely when you step away from your family and everything you have tried to call your own. Yet beauty may also appear. In the autumn of 2019 Xiaolu travelled to New York to take up her position as a visiting professor for a year, leaving her child and partner behind in London. The encounter with American culture and people threatens her sense of identity and throws her into a crisis - of meaning, desire, obligation and selfhood. 
 
This is a memoir about separation - by continents, by language, and from people. It's about being an outsider and the desperate longing to connect. Xiaolu uses her exploration of language (one of the meanings of the word 'radical' is the graphic component, or root, of Chinese characters), and her own life, to create this unique text. At once a memoir, a dictionary, and an ardent love letter, it is an expression of her fascination with Western culture and her nostalgia for Eastern landscapes, and an attempt to describe the space in between. An archive of an artist's search for creative freedom, it is above all else an intimate account of her efforts to carve out a life of her own. 
 
'Radical in angle of attack, smart and brave' IAIN SINCLAIR, author of The Gold Machine

20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

'She's no good, that girl. Much too individualistic' 
 
This is the story of Fenfang who, determined to carve out a life more independent than her provincial roots, gets a job as a film extra in Beijing. But living a modern life is not as easy as it looks in this tumultuous, messy city. Grappling with the narrow world of cinema, an outworn Communist regime, and the city's far-from-progressive attitudes to women, charismatic Fenfang finds her true freedom in the one place she never expected. 
 
20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth is a sparkling and wry coming-of-age story about the changing identity of women in contemporary China. 
 
Meet ten of literature's most iconic heroines, jacketed in bold portraits by female photographers from around the world.

A Lover's Discourse

A funny and charming new novel from Xiaolu Guo about love, language, displacement and finding our place in the world

Guo is an unsparing noticer. The truthfulness and accuracy of Guo's language gives the book mischief and energy. There are shades of Lydia Davis in her carefully etched sentences as she details the ups and downs of the relationship without sentimentality. . . . Along the way, it's capacious enough to touch on moments of real darkness, while somehow managing to be mordant, funny and, ultimately, life-affirming

A fragmentary meditation on the nature of love, on desire and on connection between two humans . . . this book sets off cross-cultural echoes with the lightest of strokes

Xiaolu Guo writes with tremendous delicacy and nuance about migration, language, alienation, and love . . . Guo has pared down every tiny chapter to its poetic essence so as to let the largest themes emerge, thus taking the reader from the verbal to something approaching the numinous

A story told with charm that will leave you in a ponderous mood

Guo's latest novel . . . demonstrates how much can be achieved when narrative is cut loose from plot and scene-setting in favour of free-floating reflection

An absolute must-read and one of the finest novels of 2020, period

Xiaolu Guo is adept at exploring cultural difference . . . It's a subject she knows well and she delivers it in her customary forthright and entertaining style

Do we feel we belong once we have a sense of place, or does the feeling instead come from our relationships? Xiaolu Guo tackles this and other heady questions . . . Through her precise and unflinching language, a revealing account emerges of how one mind opens to another, how it processes each decision and moment of wondering

A calmly searching, contemplative novel

'A fragmentary meditation on the nature of love' Guardian 
 
A Chinese woman comes to post-Brexit London to start over - just as the Brexit campaign reaches a fever pitch. 
 
 Isolated and lonely in a Britain increasingly hostile to foreigners, she meets a landscape architect and the two begin to build their future together. 
 
Playing with language and the cultural differences that our narrator encounters as she settles into her new life, the lovers must navigate their differences and their romance, whether on their unmoored houseboat or in a cramped apartment in east London. Suffused with a wonderful sense of humour, this intimate novel asks what it means to make a home and a family in a new land.

(Vintage Voyages)

A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers

VINTAGE VOYAGES: A world of journeys, from the tallest mountains to the depths of the mind

Written in deliberately bad English, this is a wonderful comic romance

Xiaolu is a fabulous writer, fresh, witty and intelligent. She handles language in an astonishing way. I don't think I have enjoyed a book as much in the last twelve months and I am looking forward to hearing a lot more from this promising young voice.

A delicate combination of unwitting humour, sadness, sex and displacement. Unputdownable.

Her characterisation of Z's lover is subtle and profound... This novel will be compared with A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, but it is so much better than that. Guo uses her minimalist, messed-up prose not just to tell an affecting coming-of-age story, but to ask deep questions about the real differences between Chinese and British culture and language.

An auspicious English language debut...its young heroine adrift in a London whose people and customs prove as full of pitfalls as the tongue she struggles to master.

A charming and clever account of one woman’s exploration of love, language and identity. 
 
Twenty-three-year-old Zhuang (or Z as she calls herself) arrives in London to spend a year learning English. Struggling to find her way in the city, and through the puzzles of tense, verb and adverb; she falls for an older Englishman and begins to realise that the landscape of love is an even trickier terrain... 
 
VINTAGE VOYAGES: A world of journeys, from the tallest mountains to the depths of the mind

A Story of Growing up

Once Upon A Time in the East

A memoir of growing up in modern China from the Orange-shortlisted and Granta Best Young British Novelist.

Stunning...This book will make your jaw drop, then clench in anger.

Guo is rebellious, flamboyant and fundamentally optimistic...fascinating.

Riveting...Guo is an angrier, bolder, more ambitious figure than her forebears.

Utterly compelling... She writes superbly about her struggle to escape the constraints of gender, poverty and state interference. This extraordinary memoir will enhance her burgeoning reputation.

Aside from the fast-paced plot, this is most interesting for its probing portrayal of Guo’s ambivalent relationship with her homeland… An impressive feature of this moving and often exhilarating book is the brutality of her portrait of her parents.

A new Wild Swans. A compelling memoir fit to sit alongside Jung Chang’s classic

This autobiography is her account of fiery, artistic defiance and a testament to the act of storytelling as a way to break the silence... Guo writes in the audacious, restless and fragmented prose that has become her imprint: a feverish style that can be as merciless as the world she portrays.

Guo's autobiography picks up almost precisely where Chang's [Wild Swans] left off - in 1978, when she is five - and guides us through the brutal industrialisation of a country in which Wild Swans remains a banned book. Guo's writing is more personal and poetic than Chang's crisp, scholarly prose - and more openly angry.

The life story of the young Chinese filmmaker and novelist Xiaolu Guo makes Cinderella’s seem bland… Don’t be deceived by the calmness of her prose, because you should feel for her… Her writing here is raw and powerful… I applaud her tale of survival, because it is one that lingers… night after night

Vivid and funny… [Once Upon a Time in the East] shows the rewards of listening to an unleashed voice remembering and speaking with full freedom

Xiaolu writes so well that one can experience the very pathos they felt, this is clear all the way through the book though, this easily produces the overwhelming absorption one gets from the narrative…  The book is a wonderful experience to read, one cannot help but be inspired, interested, and in awe of her accomplishments both in qualifications and her personal life. I take my hat off to her, excellent book from beginning to end, with barely a word wasted on hype and platitude as a dust-cover reviewer states

If this tale were fiction, it would be unbelievable; as memoir it is inspiring.

*Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award* 
*Shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award* 
*Shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize* 
*Shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2018* 
*A Sunday Times Book of the Year* 
 
Xiaolu Guo meets her parents for the first time when she is almost seven. They are strangers to her. 
 
When she is born in 1973, her parents hand her over to a childless peasant couple in the mountains. Aged two, and suffering from malnutrition on a diet of yam leaves, they leave Xiaolu with her illiterate grandparents in a fishing village on the East China Sea. 
 
Once Upon a Time in the East takes Xiaolu from a run-down shack to film school in a rapidly changing Beijing, navigating the everyday peculiarity of modern China: censorship, underground art, Western boyfriends. In 2002 she leaves Beijing on a scholarship to study in Britain. Now, after a decade in Europe, her tale of East to West resonates with the insight that can only come from someone who is both an outsider and at home. 
 
'This generation's Wild Swans' Daily Telegraph

Vintage Minis

Language

Vintage Minis bring you the world’s greatest writers on the experiences that make us human – from birth to death and everything in between

An utterly captivating, and disorientating, journey both through language and through love

Imagine our joy when Vintage announced that it is publishing a collection of easily digestible books from the world’s most celebrated writers on the experiences that make us human… They look good and read well. That’s win/win in our book.

Have you ever tried to learn another language? When Zhuang first arrives in London from China she feels like she is among an alien species. The city is disorientating, the people unfriendly, the language a muddle of personal pronouns and moody verbs. But with increasing fluency in English surviving turns to living. And they say that the best way to learn a language is to fall in love with a native speaker… 
 
Selected from the book A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo 
 
 VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS. 
 
A series of short books by the world’s greatest writers on the experiences that make us human 
 
 Also in the Vintage Minis series: 
Babies by Anne Enright 
 Depression by William Styron 
 Race by Toni Morrison 
 Home by Salman Rushdie

What happens when a Chinese girl adrift in Britain falls for an Englishman adrift in life: a funny, sexy, romantic novel. 
 
Shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2007.

Without doubt the most enjoyable – hilarious, brilliant and poignant – novel I read this year

Guo uses her minimalist messed-up prose not just to tell an affecting coming-of-age story but to ask deep questions about the real differences between Chinese and British culture and language

Funny and charming...more than a love story; its psychology is politically acute, and things noted lightly in it linger in the mind

It is impossible not to be charmed by her matter-of-factness. As the story grows in complexity with Z's growing vocabulary - the narration acquires fluency and tenses almost imperceptibly - it is equally hard not to be impressed by Guo's vivacious talent

A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers is original, humorous and wise. Within imperfect language one can find many perfect truths for the human condition. The misunderstandings are really the understandings of the differences of the heart between men and women

Captivating, charming and bittersweet...the culture clash is beautifully drawn and utterly convincing...a memorable take on East meets West

This is a troubling, humane, and emotionally provocative novel which possesses the unusual quality of forcing the reader to think

A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers is an intriguing, funny and unusual novel about what gets lost in translation

An uplifting novel with moments of great poignancy and pathos

Shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 
 
Twenty-three-year-old Zhuang (or Z as she calls herself - Westerners cannot pronounce her name) arrives in London to spend a year learning English. Struggling to find her way in the city, and through the puzzles of tense, verb and adverb; she falls for an older Englishman and begins to realise that the landscape of love is an even trickier terrain... 
 
Xiaolu Guo was named as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists

I Am China

Two lovers, separated by oceans and an oppressive political regime, desperate to find their way back to each other.

Heart-wrenching… An extraordinary and important book

Beautifully written… Genuinely affecting… Exceptional

An ambitious, thought-provoking and engaging narrative

I Am China is a moving tale of life and fate, love and loss, that will stay with the reader long after the last page

Longlisted for the Baileys Women's Fiction Prize 
 
In a flat above a noisy north London market, translator Iona Kirkpatrick starts work on a Chinese letter. Two lovers, Mu and Jian, have been driven apart by forces beyond their control. 
 
As Iona unravels the story of the lovers, Jian and Mu seem to be travelling further and further away from each other. Iona, intoxicated by their romance, sets out to bring them back together, but time is running out. 
 
Xiaolu Guo was named as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists

Because I am a Girl

EIGHT AUTHORS, EIGHT COUNTRIES, EIGHT UNFORGETTABLE STORIES

Edgy and bold...not your standard do-good, feel-good collection at all

Because I am a girl I am less likely to go to school 
Because I am a girl I am more likely to suffer from malnutrition 
Because I am a girl I am more likely to suffer violence in the home 
Because I am a girl I am more likely to marry and start a family before I reach my twenties. 
 
Eight authors have visited eight different countries and spoken to young women and girls about their lives, struggles and hopes. The result is an extraordinary collection of writings about prejudice, abuse, and neglect, but also about courage, resilience and changing attitudes. 
 
Proceeds from sales of this book will go to PLAN, one of the world's largest child-centered community development organisations.

UFO in Her Eyes

A tale of the unexpected from Orange Prize shortlisted Xiaolu Guo, also named as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists 2013.

Guo's humour is bracingly ironic and tinderbox dry

A fast moving, barbed polemic...a sharp little book in which the legacy of the Cultural Revolution shimmers and festers... A writer to read, a writer who makes every word count

A breath of the freshest air imaginable. She cuts through the smog of hype and platitude

Sprightly... the comedy is neatly poised... a damning portrait of totalitarian China

The novel resonates in revelations of loss and pain

draws national intelligence...reality-like fiction

An entertaining read with a distinctive voice - and her most ambitious work yet

Silver Hill Village, 2012. On the twentieth day of the seventh moon Kwok Yun is making her way across the rice fields on her Flying Pigeon bicycle. Her world is turned upside down when she sights a UFThing - a spinning plate in the sky - and helps the Westerner in distress whom she discovers in the shadow of the alien craft. 
 
It's not long before the village is crawling with men from the National Security and Intelligence Agency armed with pointed questions. And when the Westerner that Kwok Yun saved repays her kindness with a large dollar cheque she becomes a local celebrity, albeit under constant surveillance...

Lovers in the Age of Indifference

Xiaolu Guo, best known for her enchanting yet sharp take on culture-shock, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, presents a new work of fiction exploring the themes of love and exile that she has so brilliantly made her own.

Discover love and desire from around the globe 
 
A marriage splinters during a game of mah jong 
A depressed fiancée is lifted by a mid-air encounter with a Hollywood legend 
A mountain keeper watches over a lonely temple but is perturbed when, finally, a visitor dares to arrive. 
 
The lovers you'll encounter in Lovers in the Age of Indifference may come from across the world, but they all share a tough, romantic spirit. Written in a warm, witty prose, writer and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo's engagingly maverick collection of stories zooms in on moments in the lives of lost souls and lovers in a tender and surreal fashion. Enchantingly moving between West and East, Guo's personal, provocative and charming fables capture the sense of alienation thrown up by life in the modern world. Follow her characters in their search for human contact - and love - in rapidly-changing landscapes all around the globe 
 
'Xiaolu Guo is an instinctive witness; her atmospheric, unusually physical narratives are alive' Irish Times

Witty and original...one of China's most successful literary exports

Funny and melancholy, scintillatingly observed

Xiaolu Guo, best known for her enchanting yet sharp take on culture-shock, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, presents a new work of fiction exploring the themes of love and exile that she has so brilliantly made her own. 
 
The Lovers in the Age of Indifference are tough romantics from every corner of the planet: a marriage splinters during a game of mahjong; a chair-lift leads to a mid-air encounter with Robert Redford high over the Rockies; a lonely mountain keeper watches over a seldom-visited temple but is perturbed when, finally, a visitor dares to arrive. 
 
In this engagingly maverick collection, writer and filmmaker Guo zooms into tender and surreal moments in the lives of lost souls and lovers, adrift between West and East. Her personal, provocative and charming fables capture the sense of alienation thrown up by life in the modern world, and we join her characters in their search for human contact - and love - in rapidly-changing landscapes all around the globe.

Village Of Stone

'Reading it is rather like finding yourself in a dream... People are going to like this book very much' Doris Lessing. 
 
Xiaolu Guo wsa named as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists 2013.

A refreshing departure from much of the recent Chinese fiction to reach these shores. The language has the pared-down simplicity of a fable; the effect is a bit like that of a Haruki Murakami novel

Open this book and you will see a Chinese girl stepping towards you out of China's past and into its present, with all her dreams and striving

Exquisitely written and intricately contructed

Reading it is rather like finding yourself in a dream: "once upon a time..." People are going to like this book very much... What could have been a misery of a story has the mysterious charm of a fairy tale or a legend

Village of Stone brilliantly evokes the harshness of life on the typhoon-battered coast of China, where fishermen are often lost to violent seas and children regularly swept away. It is the beautiful, haunting story of one little girl's struggle to endure silence, solitude and the shame of sexual abuse, but it is also an incisive portrait of China's new urban youth, who have hidden behind their modern lifestyle all the poverty and cruelty of their past.

Xiaolu Guo

An astonishingly ambitious undertaking . . . you’re in the hands of a genuine storyteller

'A brilliantly written reordering of Moby-Dick, ambitious, brave, and strange, from the imagination of this natural-born storyteller. There's a cinematic, global sweep to its motion, and an unbridled energy and poetry to its dramatic words'

Guo has gender-flipped this intimidating text with bravura and style… Call Me Ishmaelle takes us on a courageous journey: it’s no aping of a classic, rather a vision of a young woman sailing out to discover not a whale but her own self. And in that, it happily succeeds

Well worth your time . . . By adding in new characters while adhering to the original story, the author creates something new, strange and thrilling

A clever and original skewering of a classic

'It’s a propulsive, powerhouse of a read that doesn’t just stand on its own literary feet, it does so with such skill and verve that it might – just might – have you turning to its source material in a new light.'

Guo gives renewed forms of life to Melville’s immense novel… [and] genuine innovation… Ishmaelle has her own story to tell, and a changing audience will want to listen

Guo’s narrative style is full of energy and Call Me Ishmaelle deftly incorporates philosophical questions about our relationship with nature and gender-dysphoria into the plot, constantly tugging at the heartstrings

'Call Me Ishmaelle is a glorious female-led retelling of a classic, combining seafaring adventure with beautifully immersive prose. Exploring gender identity, race and our relationship to the natural world, Xiaolu Guo reinvigorates Herman Melville's story while staying true to its heart.'

'From the bones of Melville's Great White Whale, Xiaolu Guo has fashioned a novel as wonderful captivating and sea-soaked, that's seems both timeless and very much of today.'

Travis Elborough, author of Atlas of Forgotten Places

'Bold and fearless, playful and witty at the same time. ... an intensely satisfying and joyful read... resonates with Xiaolu’s longstanding themes of wanting to explore the world, challenge convention, be independent and break the rules.'

[Guo’s] new book, a take on Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, doesn’t disappoint… gripping

Call me Ishmaelle is a masterpiece...Reading it felt like receiving the most intimate of gifts

Guo deftly incorporates philosophical questions about our relationship with nature gender dysphoria into the plot, with affecting results

Any retelling of a classic is risky, but this is one of the most accomplished in years

Propulsive and immediate . . . The depth is worthy of the source . . . A rich addition to Melvilliana'

A spectacular retelling of Moby-Dick . . . direct and elemental prose . . . captivating . . . Newcomers to Moby-Dick and Melville devotees alike will find much to love

Thrilling, innovative, and revolutionary . . . Ishmaelle’s gender transformation challenges the social scripts that manufacture identity while highlighting the very real dangers of being a woman . . . Balancing sentimentality and adventure, Call Me Ishmaelle speaks to those who long to feel at home in themselves

‘A smart gender-flipped version of Moby Dick’ Daily Telegraph 
‘A clever and original skewering of a classic’ i News 
‘A brilliantly written reordering of Moby-Dick’ Philip Hoare 
 
Call Me Ishmaelle reimagines the epic battle between man and nature in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick from a female perspective – perfect for fans Madeline Miller, Percival Everett and Barbara Kingsolver 
 
 
In 1843, in a small village on the stormy Kent coast, Ishmaelle is born. She grows up swimming with dolphins and eventually – desperate for a life at sea – she disguises herself as a cabin boy and travels to New York. 
 
As the American Civil War breaks out, Ishmaelle boards a whaling ship led by the obsessive Captain Seneca, a Black free man of heroic stature who is haunted by a tragic past. Here, she finds protectors amidst the bloody male violence of whaling and discovers a mysterious bond between herself and the mythical white whale Moby Dick… 
 
‘One of the most valuable writers in the world’ Deborah Levy 
 
‘Guo has gender-flipped this intimidating text with bravura and style… Call Me Ishmaelle takes us on a courageous journey: it’s no aping of a classic, rather a vision of a young woman sailing out to discover not a whale but her own self. And in that, it happily succeeds’ Daily Telegraph 
 
‘An astonishingly ambitious undertaking . . . you’re in the hands of a genuine storyteller’ New York Times Book Review

Xiaolu Guo

Praise for Call Me Ishmaelle

An astonishingly ambitious undertaking . . . you’re in the hands of a genuine storyteller

'**A brilliantly written reordering of Moby-Dick, ambitious, brave, and strange**, from the imagination of this natural-born storyteller. There's a cinematic, global sweep to its motion, and an unbridled e ...

Guo has gender-flipped this intimidating text with bravura and style… Call Me Ishmaelle takes us on a courageous journey: it’s no aping of a classic, rather a vision of a young woman sailing out to dis ...

An astonishingly ambitious undertaking . . . you’re in the hands of a genuine storyteller

'**A brilliantly written reordering of Moby-Dick, ambitious, brave, and strange**, from the imagination of this natural-born storyteller. There's a cinematic, global sweep to its motion, and an unbridled e ...

Guo has gender-flipped this intimidating text with bravura and style… Call Me Ishmaelle takes us on a courageous journey: it’s no aping of a classic, rather a vision of a young woman sailing out to dis ...

An astonishingly ambitious undertaking . . . you’re in the hands of a genuine storyteller

'**A brilliantly written reordering of Moby-Dick, ambitious, brave, and strange**, from the imagination of this natural-born storyteller. There's a cinematic, global sweep to its motion, and an unbridled e ...

Guo has gender-flipped this intimidating text with bravura and style… Call Me Ishmaelle takes us on a courageous journey: it’s no aping of a classic, rather a vision of a young woman sailing out to dis ...

Books by Xiaolu Guo

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Where to start reading Xiaolu Guo

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Praise for Call Me Ishmaelle

An astonishingly ambitious undertaking . . . you’re in the hands of a genuine storyteller

'A brilliantly written reordering of Moby-Dick, ambitious, brave, and strange, from the imagination of this natural-born storyteller. There's a cinematic, global sweep to its motion, and an unbridled e ...

Guo has gender-flipped this intimidating text with bravura and style… Call Me Ishmaelle takes us on a courageous journey: it’s no aping of a classic, rather a vision of a young woman sailing out to dis ...

An astonishingly ambitious undertaking . . . you’re in the hands of a genuine storyteller

'A brilliantly written reordering of Moby-Dick, ambitious, brave, and strange, from the imagination of this natural-born storyteller. There's a cinematic, global sweep to its motion, and an unbridled e ...

Guo has gender-flipped this intimidating text with bravura and style… Call Me Ishmaelle takes us on a courageous journey: it’s no aping of a classic, rather a vision of a young woman sailing out to dis ...

An astonishingly ambitious undertaking . . . you’re in the hands of a genuine storyteller

'A brilliantly written reordering of Moby-Dick, ambitious, brave, and strange, from the imagination of this natural-born storyteller. There's a cinematic, global sweep to its motion, and an unbridled e ...

Guo has gender-flipped this intimidating text with bravura and style… Call Me Ishmaelle takes us on a courageous journey: it’s no aping of a classic, rather a vision of a young woman sailing out to dis ...

Books by Xiaolu Guo

Articles featuring Xiaolu Guo

Where to start reading Xiaolu Guo

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter

'**A brilliantly written reordering of Moby-Dick, ambitious, brave, and strange**, from the imagination of this natural-born storyteller. There's a cinematic, global sweep to its motion, and an unbridled e ...

'**A brilliantly written reordering of Moby-Dick, ambitious, brave, and strange**, from the imagination of this natural-born storyteller. There's a cinematic, global sweep to its motion, and an unbridled e ...

'**A brilliantly written reordering of Moby-Dick, ambitious, brave, and strange**, from the imagination of this natural-born storyteller. There's a cinematic, global sweep to its motion, and an unbridled e ...