Xiaolu-Guo

Reading lists

Where to start reading Xiaolu Guo

Call Me Ishmaelle

Call Me Ishmaelle reimagines the epic battle between man and nature in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick from a female perspective. 
 
'Brilliantly written... ambitious, brave, strange' Philip Hoare 
‘A clever and original skewering of a classic’ i 
 
1843. Ishmaelle is born in a small village on the stormy Kent coast where she grows up swimming with dolphins. After her parents and infant sister die, her brother, Joseph, leaves to find work as a sailor. Abandoned and desperate for a life at sea, Ishmaelle disguises herself as a cabin boy and travels to New York. 
 
As the American Civil War breaks out in 1861, Ishmaelle boards the Nimrod, a whaling ship led by the obsessive Captain Seneca, a Black free man of heroic stature who is haunted by a tragic past. Here, she finds protectors in Polynesian harpooner, Kauri, and Taoist monk, Muzi, whose readings of the I-Ching guide their quest. 
 
Through the bloody male violence of whaling, and the unveiling of her feminine identity, Ishmaelle realises there is a mysterious bond between herself and the mythical white whale, Moby Dick. Xiaolu Guo has crafted a dramatically different, feminist narrative that stands alongside the original while offering a powerful exploration of nature, gender and human purpose. 
 
Perfect for fans Madeline Miller, Percival Everett and Barbara Kingsolver

'A brilliantly written reordering of Moby-Dick, ambitious, brave, and strange, from the imagination of this natural-born storyteller. There's a cinematic, global sweep to its motion, and an unbridled energy and poetry to its dramatic words'

'Call Me Ishmaelle is a glorious female-led retelling of a classic, combining seafaring adventure with beautifully immersive prose. Exploring gender identity, race and our relationship to the natural world, Xiaolu Guo reinvigorates Herman Melville's story while staying true to its heart.'

'From the bones of Melville's Great White Whale, Xiaolu Guo has fashioned a novel as wonderful captivating and sea-soaked, that's seems both timeless and very much of today.'

Travis Elborough, author of Atlas of Forgotten Places

A clever and original skewering of a classic

'Bold and fearless, playful and witty at the same time. ... an intensely satisfying and joyful read... resonates with Xiaolu’s longstanding themes of wanting to explore the world, challenge convention, be independent and break the rules.'

Guo gives renewed forms of life to Melville’s immense novel… [and] genuine innovation… Ishmaelle has her own story to tell, and a changing audience will want to listen

Guo has gender-flipped this intimidating text with bravura and style… Call Me Ishmaelle takes us on a courageous journey: it’s no aping of a classic, rather a vision of a young woman sailing out to discover not a whale but her own self. And in that, it happily succeeds

Guo’s narrative style is full of energy and Call Me Ishmaelle deftly incorporates philosophical questions about our relationship with nature and gender-dysphoria into the plot, constantly tugging at the heartstrings

[Guo’s] new book, a take on Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, doesn’t disappoint… gripping

'It’s a propulsive, powerhouse of a read that doesn’t just stand on its own literary feet, it does so with such skill and verve that it might – just might – have you turning to its source material in a new light.'

Call me Ishmaelle is a masterpiece...Reading it felt like receiving the most intimate of gifts

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.

Moby-Dick reimagined from the perspective of a cross-dressed female sailor 
 
'Brilliantly written... ambitious, brave, strange' Philip Hoare 
'One of the most valuable writers in the world' Deborah Levy 
 
1843. Ishmaelle is born in a small village on the stormy Kent coast where she grows up swimming with dolphins. After her parents and infant sister die, her brother, Joseph, leaves to find work as a sailor. Abandoned and desperate for a life at sea, Ishmaelle disguises herself as a cabin boy and travels to New York. 
 
Call Me Ishmaelle reimagines the epic battle between man and nature in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick from a female perspective. As the American Civil War breaks out in 1861, Ishmaelle boards the Nimrod, a whaling ship led by the obsessive Captain Seneca, a Black free man of heroic stature who is haunted by a tragic past. Here, she finds protectors in Polynesian harpooner, Kauri, and Taoist monk, Muzi, whose readings of the I-Ching guide their quest. 
 
Through the bloody male violence of whaling, and the unveiling of her feminine identity, Ishmaelle realises there is a mysterious bond between herself and the mythical white whale, Moby Dick. Xiaolu Guo has crafted a dramatically different, feminist narrative that stands alongside the original while offering a powerful exploration of nature, gender and human purpose.

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

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

Xiaolu Guo

This is a beautiful, witty meditation on cultural cross-pollination on the English coast, and the meaning of home and history for a wandering artist

Xiaolu Guo is currently one of the finest stylists writing in English. She is also one of the most insightful analysts of Englishness. This book’s curiosity about the history, geography and everyday life of Hastings, and its intimate, often melancholic confessions about living there as an outsider, make it both a haunting contribution to debates about the state of the nation and a moving, intensely personal account of acquiring a sense of place.

'As sharp and fresh as the wild garlic the author forages. A book to share and savour, bright and brilliant against the grey, grim post-Brexit, xenophobic times within and against which Guo writes.'

'With the eye of a filmmaker and the soul of a poet, Xiaolu transforms every experience into something thrilling and unique. It never ceases to amaze me how beautifully and imaginatively she organises the world around her, the collisions between cultures, between the inner life and outer, into her own philosophical quest. One of the most alchemical writers of our time.'

'Every time Xiaolu Guo publishes a new book I devour it immediately, and My Battle of Hastings was no exception. This is urgent, compelling, but also delightful writing, a book about war unlike any you'll ever read. Guo writes with a lightness of touch that belies the seriousness of her subject. How does she do it?'

‘Moving, delicate, and bracing, My Battle of Hastings combines personal and local histories with rigour and yet remains compulsively readable.’

Guo’s… form of life-writing is not merely personal, but aims to be political, foundational and future-forward, in a vibrant, varied tradition that includes Deborah Levy’s The Cost of Living series, the auto-fiction of Annie Ernaux… Virginia Woolf would be proud

There is nobody quite like Xiaolu Guo… She is a uniquely determined writer, documenting her quest to live life on her own terms… With My Battle of Hastings, Guo shows us the effort that it takes to truly put down roots in a culture so different from the one she was born into

A meditation not only on how history has shaped Hastings, but also on what it means to locate oneself within history

Guo’s delightfully frank and often moving memoir is also a poignant exploration of identity and belonging

Chronicle of a Year by the Sea

‘This is urgent, compelling but also delightful writing’ Lauren Elkin 
 
In the depths of winter, Xiaolu Guo moves into a tiny dilapidated flat on the Hastings seafront – a room of her own where she can spend time writing, liberated from her domestic responsibilities in London. 
 
She immerses herself in the English landscape and its past and becomes preoccupied by the violence between Normans and Saxons. Filled with profound, beautiful and wry reflections on war, history, migration and belonging 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. 
 
'Magnificent, brutal and poetic' Iain Sinclair 
 
‘There is nobody quite like Xiaolu Guo… With My Battle of Hastings, Guo shows us the effort that it takes to truly put down roots in a culture so different from the one she was born into’ The Times

Xiaolu Guo

Praise for My Battle of Hastings

This is a beautiful, witty meditation on cultural cross-pollination on the English coast, and the meaning of home and history for a wandering artist

Xiaolu Guo is currently one of the finest stylists writing in English. She is also one of the most insightful analysts of Englishness. This book’s curiosity about the history, geography and everyday li ...

'Magnificent, brutal and poetic'

This is a beautiful, witty meditation on cultural cross-pollination on the English coast, and the meaning of home and history for a wandering artist

Xiaolu Guo is currently one of the finest stylists writing in English. She is also one of the most insightful analysts of Englishness. This book’s curiosity about the history, geography and everyday li ...

'Magnificent, brutal and poetic'

This is a beautiful, witty meditation on cultural cross-pollination on the English coast, and the meaning of home and history for a wandering artist

Xiaolu Guo is currently one of the finest stylists writing in English. She is also one of the most insightful analysts of Englishness. This book’s curiosity about the history, geography and everyday li ...

'Magnificent, brutal and poetic'

Books by Xiaolu Guo

Series by Xiaolu Guo

Vintage Heroines

Articles featuring Xiaolu Guo

Where to start reading Xiaolu Guo

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter