Xiaolu Guo

A Chinese woman comes to London to start a new life, away from her old world. She knew she would be lonely, adrift in the city, but will her new relationship bring her closer to this land she has chosen, will their love give her a home?

A Lover's Discourse

A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers

Communication is proving tricky for Ziao, a young woman fresh off the plane from China. When she finds herself pitched headlong into an affair, and living with her English boyfriend, she decides to write her very own dictionary, a Chinese-English dictionary for lovers. But will her new love survive the cultural chasms between East and West?

'So I was the 6787th person in Beijing wanting to act in the film and TV industry. There were 6786 young and beautiful, or ugly and old people before me trying to get a role. I felt the competition, but compared with 1.6 billion people in China, 6786 was only the population of my village. I felt an urge to conquer this new village.' Life as a film extra in Beijing might seem hard, but Fenfang - the spirited heroine of Xiaolu Guo's new novel - won't be defeated. She has travelled 1800 miles to seek her fortune in the city, and has no desire to return to the never-ending sweet potato fields back home. Determined to live a modern life, Fenfang works as a cleaner in the Young Pioneer's movie theatre, falls in love with unsuitable men and keeps her kitchen cupboard stocked with UFO instant noodles. As Fenfang might say, Heavenly Bastard in the Sky, isn't it about time I got my lucky break?

20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

A London publisher translates a correspondence between two young lovers, including a Beijing singer from a loving family and a famous punk rocker who weaves his subversive political views into his music. By the award-winning author of Village of Stone. 25,000 first printing.

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 Loversby 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 humanAlso in the Vintage Minis series-Babies by Anne Enright Depression by William Styron Race by Toni Morrison Homeby Salman Rushdie

Language

*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

A Story of Growing up

Once Upon A Time in the East

This haunting, beautiful novel from the acclaimed filmmaker Xiaolu Guo has the simplicity of a fable with an incisive portrait of China's new urban youth.

Village of Stone

From one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists, Xiaolu Guo's memoir documents her trajectory from a small fishing village in rural China to life in the West as a fearless writer and filmmaker.

A Memoir in and Out of China

Nine Continents

Written in a series of short chapters, with each one becoming the definition of a word, a literary novel about a young Chinese woman caught in the cultural confusion of England pokes fun at both England and China and explores the endless possibilities for misunderstanding between East and West, and between men and women. Reprint. 12,500 first printing.

Determined to seek her fortune in Beijing, Fenfang Wang leaves her rural farm to travel 1,800 miles to pursue her dreams in the city where, setting out to live a modern life, she lands a job as a film extra, falls under the spell of two unsuitable young men, and finally finds her true calling in an unexpected place. By the author of A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers. 15,000 first printing.

Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

"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 upturned 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. As UFO Hotels spring up, and the local villagers go out of business, Xiaolu Guo's startling parable of change imagines an uneasy future for rural China and its relations not only with Beijing but the wider world beyond.

UFO in Her Eyes

Joanne Harris

Tim Butcher

Irvine Welsh

Deborah Moggach

Kathy Lette

Marie Phillips

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.

Because I am a Girl

A story of desire, love, language, and the meaning of home set against the backdrop of Brexit London—from the award-winning author of Nine Continents. A Chinese woman moves from Beijing to London for a doctoral program—and to begin a new life—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 a life together. A Lover’s Discourse is an exploration of romantic love told through fragments of conversations between the two lovers. Playing with language and the cultural differences that her narrator encounters as she settles into life in post-Brexit vote Britain, the lovers must navigate their differences and their romance, whether on their unmoored houseboat or in a cramped and stifling apartment in east London. Suffused with a wonderful sense of humor, this intimate and tender novel asks what it means to make a home and a family in a new land. “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.” —USA Today “A fragmentary meditation on the nature of love, on desire and on connection between two humans . . . sets off cross-cultural echoes with the lightest of strokes.” —The Guardian “Unlike Roland Barthes’ book by the same name, Xiaolu Guo’s A Lover’s Discourse is a love story as a genuine dialogue, not only between lovers, but between languages, cultures, and philosophies. Swift, astute, and funny.” —Siri Hustvedt, international–bestselling author

A Novel

Quand la jeune héroïne chinoise de ce roman arrive à Londres afin d'y apprendre l'anglais, envoyée de Wenzhou par ses parents ambitieux, elle commence par perdre les roues de sa valise Made in China, puis son nom ! Zhuang Xiao Qiao se transforme en Z car, ainsi qu'elle l'explique dans un anglais impossible, moi pas prononçable ! ". Armée de son anglais fastidieux, souvent exécrable mais toujours craquant - et de son dictionnaire bilingue - Z arpente les rues de Londres et fréquente ses cinémas. C'est d'ailleurs là qu'elle rencontre l'homme qui deviendra son amant, un quadra désabusé du quartier de Hackney et à sa grande horreur (surtout pour une fille de paysans chinois amateurs de viande de porc), végétarien ! Leur amour triomphera-t-il des nombreuses oppositions entre un Anglais et une jeune Chinoise ? Saura-t-il dépasser les malentendus infinis mais cocasses nés des innombrables fautes d'anglais de la jeune femme ?.. Roman d'initiation attachant et drôle écrit dans un anglais de débutante, ce Petit Dictionnaire chinois-anglais pour amants est le journal intime et sentimental d'une Orientale candide et ironique, à la fois épatée et déboussolée par les travers de l'Occident. Mais c'est également un lexique romanesque, impétueux, grave et aigre-doux, à l'image de Z, qui éclaire d'une lumière nouvelle les paradoxes de la globalisation.

Petit dictionnaire chinois-anglais pour amants

Chloe Aridjis

Viola di Grado

London, a city of constant transition, transaction, translation. London does not exist; London is a language without a place and it is the aphasic city; it's the mother of all languages. Lucifer Over London is a new anthology nine narrative essays written by a host of international prize-winning authors including Chloe Aridjis, Viola di Grado, Xiaolu Guo, Joanna Walsh and Zinovy Zinik. First published in Italy by Humboldt Books, Lucifer Over London is now appearing in English for the first time. This is a version of London as seen from the immigrants of recent migrations, of deportations to come, from those who create London even as they contradict it.

A Guide to the Adopted City

Lucifer Over London

The lovers in the age of indifference are tough romantics from every corner of the planet: 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. In this engagingly maverick collection of stories, 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.

Lovers in the Age of Indifference

From one of our most important contemporary Chinese authors: a novel of language and love that tells one young Chinese woman's story of her journey to the West—and her attempts to understand the language, and the man, she adores. Zhuang—or “Z,” to tongue-tied foreigners—has come to London to study English, but finds herself adrift, trapped in a cycle of cultural gaffes and grammatical mishaps. Then she meets an Englishman who changes everything, leading her into a world of self-discovery. She soon realizes that, in the West, “love” does not always mean the same as in China, and that you can learn all the words in the English language and still not understand your lover. And as the novel progresses with steadily improving grammar and vocabulary, Z's evolving voice makes her quest for comprehension all the more poignant. With sparkling wit, Xiaolu Guo has created an utterly original novel about identity and the cultural divide.

Xiaolu Guo

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