NINE CONTINENTS: A Memoir in and Out of China

A fascinating portrait of China in the 1980s and 1990s, how the Cultural Revolution shaped families, and how the country's economic ambitions gave rise to great change. Xiaolu Guo is one of the most acclaimed Chinese-born writers of her generation. She lives in London and Berlin. Her iconoclastic and completely contemporary voice gave us 'A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers' and 'I Am China'. Her vivid and poignant memoir is the story of a curious mind coming of age in an inhospitable country, and her determination to seek a life beyond the limits of its borders. She has travelled further than most to be who she needed to be. Now spurred by the birth of her daughter in a London maternity ward surrounded by women from all over the world, she looks back on her journey which began in a fishing village shack on the East China Sea. There her illiterate grandparents raised her and brought her to the city of Wenling to reunite with parents she had never met. She learned the dangers of being a girl. A young woman and aspiring filmmaker, she got herself to a rapidly changing Beijing, full of contradictions - a thriving underground art scene amid mass censorship, curious Westerners who held out affection only to disappear back home. Eventually, unable to make the films or write the books she wanted to create, Xiaolu determined to see the world beyond China for herself, and now after some 15 years in Europe, her words resonate with the insight of someone who is both outsider and insider. 'A certain nostalgia washed over me, and I try to remember the taste of the roasted silkworms on skewers that I had eaten so often as a child on those desolate afternoons after school. But I couldn't recall the taste on my tongue.' Reading like fiction, she brings to life her lifelong struggles against the chains of poverty, gender and censorship in her coming-of-age story. 366pp, photos.