My Battle of Hastings

Chronicle of a Year by the Sea

Xiaolu Guo

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Hardback

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English

Chatto & Windus
06 August 2024

Biography; Memoirs; History: specific events & topics; Social & cultural history; Migration, immigration & emigration; The natural world, country life & pets

The new memoir in a triptych from prize-winning writer and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo in which she moves to Hastings to find a room of her own and immerses herself in local history

'One of the most valuable writers in the world' Deborah Levy

My Battle of Hastings is an exploration of how an immigrant, an outsider and a woman can embrace local and national history.

In winter 2021, Xiaolu Guo moved into a tiny dilapidated flat on the Hastings seafront, a room of her own where she could spend time writing away from her domestic duties as a mother and wife in London. As Russia invaded Ukraine, she immersed herself in the English landscape and its past, especially the violence between Normans and Saxons.

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. Filled with profound, beautiful and wry reflections on war, history, migration and belonging, Xiaolu's journey into the past completes the triptych of memoirs that began with Once Upon a Time in the East, charting her childhood in China, then continued with Radical- A Life of My Own in search of a freedom beyond her home.

By: Xiaolu Guo
Imprint: Chatto & Windus
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 223mm, Width: 142mm, Spine: 21mm
Weight: 317g
ISBN: 9781784745370
ISBN 10: 1784745375
Pages: 256
Publication Date: 06 August 2024
Audience: General/trade , College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , ELT Advanced , Primary
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

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

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 * Xiaolu Guo is currently one of the finest stylists writing in English. She is also one of the most insightful analysts of Englishness. This book’s curiosity about the history, geography and everyday life of Hastings, and its intimate, often melancholic confessions about living there as an outsider, make it both a haunting contribution to debates about the state of the nation and a moving, intensely personal account of acquiring a sense of place. * Matthew Beaumont *