A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers

Written in deliberately bad English, this is a wonderful comic romance – Eileen Battersby * Irish Times *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. * Joanne Harris *A delicate combination of unwitting humour, sadness, sex and displacement. Unputdownable. * Katie Fforde *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. – Scarlett Thomas * Independent on Sunday *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. – Boyd Tonkin * Independent, Christmas books special *

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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