My Battle of Hastings - Chronicle of a Year by the Sea

''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 and becomes 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

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.

Report

This is a beautiful, witty meditation on cultural cross-pollination on the English coast, and the meaning of home and history for a wandering artist Alice Albinia, author of The Britannias

Product details

• Authors: Xiaolu Guo, Guo Xiaolu
• Publisher: Vintage UK
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 20.03.2025
• EAN: 9781529918670
• ISBN: 978-1-5299-1867-0
• No. of pages: 208
• Dimensions: 129 mm x 198 mm x 15 mm
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature > Letters, diaries; Humanities, art, music > History > Cultural history; Sussex, NATURE / General, History: specific events & topics, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Emigration & Immigration, HISTORY / Military / General, HISTORY / Social History, Memoirs, Social & cultural history, natural history, Migration, immigration & emigration, Social and cultural history, Migration, immigration and emigration, Nature and the natural world: general interest, Invasion, conquest and occupation, BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Memoirs