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My Battle of Hastings
Chronicle of a Year by the Sea
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Brief Description
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. 'One of the most valuable writers in the world' - Deborah Levy My Battle...
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Format: Hardback
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Description
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.
'One of the most valuable writers in the world' - Deborah Levy
My Battle of Hastings is an exploration of how an immigrant, an outsider, and a woman can embrace local and national history.
In winter 2021, Xiaolu Guo moved into a tiny dilapidated flat on the Hastings seafront, a room of her own where she could spend time writing away from her domestic duties in London. As Russia invaded Ukraine, she immersed herself in the English landscape and its past, especially the violence between Normans and Saxons.
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. Filled with profound, beautiful, and wry reflections on war, history, migration, and belonging, Xiaolu's journey into the past completes the triptych of memoirs that began with Once Upon a Time in the East, charting her childhood in China, then continued with Radical - A Life of My Own in search of a freedom beyond her home.
Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9781784745370
Publisher: Vintage Publishing
Format: Hardback
Date Published: 01 August 2024
Country: United Kingdom
Imprint: Chatto & Windus
Audience: General / adult
DIMENSIONS
Spine width: 20.0mm
Width: 145.0mm
Height: 225.0mm
Weight: 316g
Pages: 208
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.
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