-
Your next favorite book
is waiting.
A Novel
by Xiaolu Guo
A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers heralds the American debut of a remarkably gifted young writer.
Twenty-three-year-old Zhuang, the daughter of shoe factory owners in rural China, has come to London to study English. She calls herself Z because English people can't pronounce her name, but she's no better at their language. Set loose to find her way through a confusion of cultural gaffes and grammatical mishaps, she winds up lodging with a Chinese family and thinks she might as well not have left home. But then she meets an English man who changes everything. From the moment he smiles at her, she enters a new world of sex, freedom, and self-discovery. But she also realizes that, in the West, "love" does not always mean the same as in China, and that you can learn all the words in the English language and still not understand your lover.
Drawing on her diaries from when she first arrived in the UK, Xiaolu Guo winningly writes the story in steadily improving English grammar and vocabulary. Freshly humorous, sexy, and poignant, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers is an utterly original novel about language, identity, and the cultural divide.
"A fast, breezy read, don't be so easily entertained as to miss the many nuances—beyond the most obvious definitions are deeper, more satisfying meanings." —San Francisco Chronicle
"What makes this novel winsome is hearing the authentic voice of a young woman–bewildered, self-deprecating, funny, wise–as she navigates the world on her own." —USA Today
"[The narrator's] voice is funny, childlike and wise all at once." —Los Angeles Times
This information about A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Xiaolu Guo was born in 1973. After graduating from the Beijing Film Academy, she published a number of books in China. Since 2002, she has been dividing her time between London and Beijing. She has written and directed award-winning documentaries including The Concrete Revolution; her first feature film, How Is Your Fish Today?, was screened at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival and won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2007 International Women's Film Festival. A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, her third novel, is the first book she has written directly in English; it was short-listed for the 2007 Orange Prize for Fiction.
If you liked A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, try these:
by Chang-rae Lee
Published 2022
From the award-winning author of Native Speaker and On Such a Full Sea, an exuberant, provocative story about a young American life transformed by an unusual Asian adventure – and about the human capacities for pleasure, pain, and connection.
Last Night at the Telegraph Club
by Malinda Lo
Published 2021
Acclaimed author of Ash Malinda Lo returns with her most personal and ambitious novel yet, a gripping story of love and duty set in San Francisco's Chinatown during the 1950s.
by Liu Xinwu
Published 2021
In this sprawling, award-winning novel, celebrated Chinese writer Liu Xinwu cordially invites you to an epic, riotous, and moving neighborhood feast.
Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
Can you name the title?
Test your book knowledge with our daily trivia challenge!
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
