My Battle of Hastings

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.

Review

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

About the Author

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.