Once upon a time in the East - Xiaolu Guo

*Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography 2017*
*Shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award 2017*
*Selected as a 2017 Book of the Year in the Sunday Times
*Shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2018*

'This generation's Wild Swans' Daily Telegraph

'One of the most startling and fascinating memoirs I've read in recent years...a story of China' Libby Purves

'Impressive...moving...exhilarating' Financial Times

'Guo is rebellious, flamboyant and fundamentally optimistic...fascinating' Scotland on Sunday

'This stunning memoir picks up where Jung Chang's 1991 bestseller Wild Swans left off...This book will make your jaw drop, then clench in anger' Five stars, Sunday Telegraph

'Riveting...Guo is a bolder, angrier and more ambitious figure than her forebears' The Times


Xiaolu Guo meets her parents for the first time when she is almost seven. They are strangers to her.

When she is born her parents hand her over to a childless peasant couple in the mountains. Aged two, and suffering from malnutrition on a diet of yam leaves, they leave Xiaolu with her illiterate grandparents in a fishing village on the East China Sea. It's a strange beginning.

A Wild Swans for a new generation, Once Upon a Time in the East takes Xiaolu from a run-down shack to film school in a rapidly changing Beijing, navigating the everyday peculiarity of modern China: censorship, underground art, Western boyfriends. In 2002 she leaves Beijing on a scholarship to study in Britain. Now, after a decade in Europe, her tale of East to West resonates with the insight that can only come from someone who is both an outsider and at home.

Xiaolu Guo's extraordinary memoir is a handbook of life lessons. How to be an artist when censorship kills creativity and the only job you can get is writing bad telenovela scripts. How to be a woman when female babies are regularly drowned at birth and sexual abuse is commonplace. Most poignantly of all: how to love when you've never been shown how.