My Battle of Hastings

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

'Magnificent, brutal and poetic'

Iain Sinclair

'As sharp and fresh as the wild garlic the author forages. A book to share and savour, bright and brilliant against the grey, grim post-Brexit, xenophobic times within and against which Guo writes.'

So Mayer

'With the eye of a filmmaker and the soul of a poet, Xiaolu transforms every experience into something thrilling and unique. It never ceases to amaze me how beautifully and imaginatively she organises the world around her, the collisions between cultures, between the inner life and outer, into her own philosophical quest. One of the most alchemical writers of our time.'

Chloe Aridjis

'Every time Xiaolu Guo publishes a new book I devour it immediately, and My Battle of Hastings was no exception. This is urgent, compelling, but also delightful writing, a book about war unlike any you'll ever read. Guo writes with a lightness of touch that belies the seriousness of her subject. How does she do it?'

Lauren Elkin

‘Moving, delicate, and bracing, My Battle of Hastings combines personal and local histories with rigour and yet remains compulsively readable.’

Deepa Anappara

Guo’s… form of life-writing is not merely personal, but aims to be political, foundational and future-forward, in a vibrant, varied tradition that includes Deborah Levy’s The Cost of Living series, the auto-fiction of Annie Ernaux… Virginia Woolf would be proud

Financial Times

There is nobody quite like Xiaolu Guo… She is a uniquely determined writer, documenting her quest to live life on her own terms… 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

A meditation not only on how history has shaped Hastings, but also on what it means to locate oneself within history

Times Literary Supplement