Once Upon A Time in the East by Xiaolu Guo
Xiaolu Guo meets her parents for the first time when she is 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.
Stunning..This book will make your jaw drop, then clench in anger. -- Helen Brown * Telegraph *
Guo is rebellious, flamboyant and fundamentally optimistic...fascinating. -- Stuart Kelly * Scotland on Sunday *
Riveting...Guo is an angrier, bolder, more ambitious figure than her forebears. * The Times *
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. -- Ian Critchley * Sunday Times *
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. -- Lara Feigel * Financial Times *
Guo is rebellious, flamboyant and fundamentally optimistic...fascinating. -- Stuart Kelly * Scotland on Sunday *
Riveting...Guo is an angrier, bolder, more ambitious figure than her forebears. * The Times *
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. -- Ian Critchley * Sunday Times *
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. -- Lara Feigel * Financial Times *
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.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781784702946 |
| ISBN 10 | 1784702943 |
| Title | Once Upon A Time in the East |
| Author | Xiaolu Guo |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Vintage Publishing |
| Year published | 2018-02-01 |
| Number of pages | 336 |
| Prizes | Short-listed for Costa Biography Award 2018 (UK), Short-listed for Jhalak Prize 2018 (UK), Short-listed for The Folio Prize 2018 (UK) |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |