Twenty-three-year-old Zhuang arrives in London to spend a year learning English. Struggling to find her way in the city, and through the puzzles of tense, verb and adverb; she falls for an older Englishman and begins to realise that the landscape of love is an even trickier terrain...

Life as a film extra in Beijing might seem hard, but Fenfang the spirited heroine of this novel won't be defeated. She has travelled 1800 miles to seek her fortune in the city, and has no desire to return to the never-ending sweet potato fields back home

In a flat above a noisy north London market, translator Iona Kirkpatrick starts work on a Chinese letter: Dearest Mu, The sun is piercing, old bastard sky. I am feeling empty and bare. Nothing is in my soul, apart from the image of you. I am writing to you from a place I cannot tell you about yet...In a detention centre in Dover exiled Chinese musician Jian is awaiting an unknown fate. In Beijing his girlfriend Mu sends desperate letters to London to track him down, her last memory of them together a roaring rock concert and Jian the king on stage. Until the state police stormed in. As Iona...

Selected from the book A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS. Also in the Vintage Minis series: Desire by Haruki Murakami Eating by Nigella Lawson Race by Toni Morrison Babies by Anne Enright

*Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award 2017* *Shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award 2017**Selected as a 2017 Book of the Year in the Sunday Times*Xiaolu Guo meets her parents for the first time when she is almost seven.

A charming and clever account of one woman's exploration of love, language and identity. Twenty-three-year-old Zhuang (or Z as she calls herself) arrives in London to spend a year learning English.