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Chatto & Windus authors Xiaolu Guo and Kayo Chingonyi shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize

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

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.

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

Xiaolu Guo

Chronicle of a Year by the Sea

'One of the most valuable writers in the world' Deborah Levy 
 
My Battle of Hastings is an exploration of how an immigrant, an outsider and a woman can embrace local and national history. 
 
In winter 2021, Xiaolu Guo moved into a tiny dilapidated flat on the Hastings seafront, a room of her own where she could spend time writing away from her domestic duties in London. As Russia invaded Ukraine, she immersed herself in the English landscape and its past, especially the violence between Normans and Saxons. 
 
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. Filled with profound, beautiful and wry reflections on war, history, migration and belonging, Xiaolu’s journey into the past completes the triptych of memoirs that began with Once Upon a Time in the East, charting her childhood in China, then continued with Radical: A Life of My Own in search of a freedom beyond her home.

Xiaolu Guo

My Battle of Hastings

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