Longlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction 2015.
In a flat above a noisy north London market, translator Iona Kirkpatrick starts work on a Chinese letter: Dearest Mu, The sun is piercing, old bastard sky. I am feeling empty and bare. Nothing is in my soul, apart from the image of you. I am writing to you from a place I cannot tell you about yet. In a detention centre in Dover exiled Chinese musician Jian is awaiting an unknown fate. In Beijing his girlfriend Mu sends desperate letters to London to track him down, her last memory of them together a roaring rock concert and Jian the king on stage. Until the state police stormed in. As Iona unravels the story of these Chinese lovers from their first flirtations at Beijing University to Jian's march in the Jasmine Revolution, Jian and Mu seem to be travelling further and further away from each other while Iona feels more and more alive. Intoxicated by their romance, Iona sets out to bring them back together, but time seems to be running out.
'Heart-wrenching... An extraordinary and important book' -- Charlie Cooper Independent
'Beautifully done' -- Viv Groskop Red
'I Am China is a moving tale of life and fate, love and loss, that will stay with the reader long after the last page' New Internationalist
'Piercingly urgent and revelatory i Dark, witty fiction' -- David Evans Financial Times
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ISBN: 9780701188191
Publication date: 05/06/2014
Publisher: Chatto & Windus an imprint of Vintage
Format: Hardback
| ISBN: | 9780701188191 |
| Publication date: | 5th June 2014 |
| Author: | Xiaolu Guo |
| Publisher: | Chatto & Windus an imprint of Vintage |
| Format: | Hardback |
| Genres: | Literary Fiction, |
| Categories: |
Xiaolu Guo was born in 1973 in a fishing village in south China. Having studied film at the Beijing Film Academy, she published a number of books in China and made the prize-winning film Love in the Internet Age (1999). She moved to London in 2002, to pursue her film-making, and began a diary in English which was the seed for the novel A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers. The English translation of Village of Stone was published by Chatto in 2004.
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