Xiaolu Guo Books

Defiant, humorous and insightful, 'Not Quite Right For Us' pierces through the hierarchical mechanics of class, race, gender. A celebration of outsiderness and an ode to otherness, 'Not Quite Right For Us' is a singular collection of stories, essays and poems by a dynamic mix of established and surging voices alike, edited by Sharmilla Beezmohun.

Xiaolu Guo meets her parents for the first time when she is almost seven. They are strangers to her. When she is born 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. It's a strange beginning. A Wild Swans for a new generation, 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. Xiaolu Guo's extraordinary memoir is a handbook of life lessons. How to be an artist when censorship kills creativity and the only job you can get is writing bad telenovela scripts. How to be a woman when female babies are regularly drowned at birth and sexual abuse is commonplace. Most poignantly of all- how to love when you've never been shown how.

'One of the most valuable writers in the world' Deborah LevyEmbodiment, assimilation, integration – these are big words, but they seem to name a stage or a state I ought to be able to achieve in my brief life.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 as a mother and wife 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 A Life of My Own in search of a freedom beyond her home.My Battle of Hastings is above all an exploration of how an immigrant, an outsider and a woman can embrace local and national history.

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

Set against the backdrop of the 1843 Kent coast, the story follows Ishmaelle, who, after losing her family, disguises herself as a cabin boy to escape her desolate life and seek adventure at sea. As she joins Captain Seneca's whaling ship, the Nimrod, during the tumultuous period of the Civil War, she navigates the brutal world of whaling alongside a diverse crew. This reimagining of Moby Dick from a female perspective explores themes of identity, nature, and the mysterious connection between Ishmaelle and the legendary whale.

"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?"--back cover

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.

After a 1800-mile journey from her village to Beijing, Fenfang discovers she is the 6787th applicant for a film role. This marks the beginning of her long search for happiness!

"From NBCC-winning author of Nine Continents Xiaolu Guo, Radical is a playful, provocative memoir of a trip to New York that upended her sense of self as a woman, partner, mother, and artist. In the autumn of 2019, Xiaolu Guo traveled to New York to take up a visiting professorship for a year, leaving her child and partner behind in London. The encounter with American culture and people threatened her sense of identity and threw her into a crisis-of meaning, desire, obligation, and selfhood. This is a book about separation-by continents, by language, and from people. It's about being an outsider and the desperate longing to connect. At once a memoir, a lexicon, and an ardent love letter, Radical is an expression of her fascination with Western culture and her nostalgia for Eastern landscapes, and an attempt to describe the space in between"--

With an introduction by Xiaolu GuoA classic memoir set during the Chinese revolution of the 1940s and inspired by folklore, providing a unique insight into the life of an immigrant in America.When we Chinese girls listened to the adults talking-story, we learned that we failed if we grew up to be but wives or slaves. We could be heroines, swordswomen. Throughout her childhood, Maxine Hong Kingston listened to her mother's mesmerizing tales of a China where girls are worthless, tradition is exalted and only a strong, wily woman can scratch her way upwards. Growing up in a changing America, surrounded by Chinese myth and memory, this is her story of two cultures and one trenchant, lyrical journey into womanhood. Complex and beautiful, angry and adoring, Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior is a seminal piece of writing about emigration and identity. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1976 and is widely hailed as a feminist classic.