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- A world of journeys, from the tallest mountains to the depths of the mind

About the Author
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.

Reviews
Written in deliberately bad English, this is a wonderful comic romance -- Eileen Battersby * Irish Times *
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. * Joanne Harris *
A delicate combination of unwitting humour, sadness, sex and displacement. Unputdownable. * Katie Fforde *
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. -- Scarlett Thomas * Independent on Sunday *
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. -- Boyd Tonkin * Independent, Christmas books special *



Book Information
ISBN 9781784875312
Author Xiaolu Guo
Format Paperback
Page Count 368
Imprint Vintage Classics
Publisher Vintage Publishing
Weight(grams) 255g
Dimensions(mm) 198mm * 129mm * 22mm