About Xiaolu Guo: 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.

Xiaolu Guo

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‘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

My Battle of Hastings

Chronicle of a Year by the Sea

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

Radical

A Life of My 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

Lovers in the Age of Indifference

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

A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers

*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

Once Upon A Time in the East

A Story of Growing up

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

I Am China

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

Language

Vintage Minis

‘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

Call Me Ishmaelle

'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.

20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

'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.

A Lover's Discourse

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

(Vintage Voyages)

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.

Village Of Stone

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...

UFO in Her Eyes

Tim Butcher

Joanne Harris

Kathy Lette

Deborah Moggach

Marie Phillips

Irvine Welsh

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.

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