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  • Published: 3 October 2005
  • ISBN: 9780099459071
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $24.99

Village Of Stone



'Reading it is rather like finding yourself in a dream... People are going to like this book very much' Doris Lessing.

Xiaolu Guo wsa named as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists 2013.

Village of Stone brilliantly evokes the harshness of life on the typhoon-battered coast of China, where fishermen are often lost to violent seas and children regularly swept away. It is the beautiful, haunting story of one little girl's struggle to endure silence, solitude and the shame of sexual abuse, but it is also an incisive portrait of China's new urban youth, who have hidden behind their modern lifestyle all the poverty and cruelty of their past.

  • Published: 3 October 2005
  • ISBN: 9780099459071
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $24.99

About the author

Xiaolu Guo

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.

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Praise for Village Of Stone

Reading it is rather like finding yourself in a dream: "once upon a time..." People are going to like this book very much... What could have been a misery of a story has the mysterious charm of a fairy tale or a legend

Doris Lessing

A refreshing departure from much of the recent Chinese fiction to reach these shores. The language has the pared-down simplicity of a fable; the effect is a bit like that of a Haruki Murakami novel

Times Literary Supplement

Open this book and you will see a Chinese girl stepping towards you out of China's past and into its present, with all her dreams and striving

Xinran

Exquisitely written and intricately contructed

Independent