A brilliant journey of self discovery for the heroine of this novel. It starts off written in fragmented English, which can be slightly awkward to read but improves as our heroine’s grasp of the language improves. A funny, witty story about communication and how even knowing each others language does not necessarily mean we understand one another.
A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers Synopsis
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
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.
