Imprint: Vintage Classics
Published: 06/06/2019
ISBN: 9781784875312
Length: 368 Pages
Dimensions: 198mm x 23mm x 129mm
Weight: 293g
RRP: £8.99
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
Imprint: Vintage Classics
Published: 06/06/2019
ISBN: 9781784875312
Length: 368 Pages
Dimensions: 198mm x 23mm x 129mm
Weight: 293g
RRP: £8.99
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.