My Battle of Hastings

Chronicle of a Year by the Sea

Xiaolu Guo author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Vintage Publishing

Publishing:20th Mar '25

£10.99

This title is due to be published on 20th March, and will be despatched as soon as possible.

This paperback is available in another edition too:

My Battle of Hastings cover

'One of the most valuable writers in the world' Deborah Levy

My Battle of Hastings is an exploration of how an immigrant, an outsider and a woman can embrace local and national history.

In the depths of winter, Xiaolu Guo moves into a tiny dilapidated flat on the Hastings seafront – a room of her own where she can spend time writing, liberated from her domestic responsibilities in London. She immerses herself in the English landscape and its past and becomes preoccupied by the violence between Normans and Saxons.

Filled with profound, beautiful and wry reflections on war, history, migration and belonging 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.

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 *

ISBN: 9781529918670

Dimensions: 198mm x 129mm x 15mm

Weight: 200g

208 pages