Once Upon A Time in the East

Stunning…This book will make your jaw drop, then clench in anger. – Helen Brown * Telegraph *
Guo is rebellious, flamboyant and fundamentally optimistic…fascinating. – Stuart Kelly * Scotland on Sunday *
Riveting…Guo is an angrier, bolder, more ambitious figure than her forebears. * The Times *
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. – Ian Critchley * Sunday Times *
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. – Lara Feigel * Financial Times *
This generation’s Wild Swans * Daily Telegraph *
A new Wild Swans. A compelling memoir fit to sit alongside Jung Chang’s classic * Sunday Times *
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. – Megan Walsh * New Statesman *
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. * Irish Independent *
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 – Rose George * Spectator *

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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