My Battle of Hastings

The new memoir in a triptych from prize-winning writer and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo, in which she moves to Hastings to find a room of her own and immerses herself in local history.

'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, becoming 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