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A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers: (Vintage Voyages)
Xiaolu Guo
€ 13.99
€ 10.81
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Description for A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers: (Vintage Voyages)
Paperback.
A charming and clever account of one woman’s exploration of love, language and identity.
Twenty-three-year-old Zhuang (or Z as she calls herself) arrives in London to spend a year learning English. Struggling to find her way in the city, and through the puzzles of tense, verb and adverb; she falls for an older Englishman and begins to realise that the landscape of love is an even trickier terrain...
VINTAGE VOYAGES: A world of journeys, from the tallest mountains to the depths of the mind
Product Details
Publisher
Vintage Publishing
Format
Paperback
Publication date
2019
Condition
New
Number of Pages
368
Place of Publication
London, United Kingdom
ISBN
9781784875312
SKU
V9781784875312
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 5 to 9 working days
Ref
99-99
About Xiaolu Guo
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.
Reviews for A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers: (Vintage Voyages)
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
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