My Battle of Hastings: Chronicle of a Year by the Sea

‘One of the most valuable writers in the world’Deborah Levy

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

In winter 2021, Xiaolu Guo moved into a tiny dilapidated flat on the Hastings seafront, a room of her own where she could spend time writing away from her domestic duties as a mother and wife in London. As Russia invaded Ukraine, she immersed herself in the English landscape and its past, especially the violence between Normans and Saxons.

My Battle of Hastingsis a chronicle of Xiaolus 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. Filled with profound, beautiful and wry reflections on war, history, migration and belonging, Xiaolus journey into the past completes the triptych of memoirs that beganwith Once Upon a Time in the East, charting her childhood in China, then continued withRadical: A Life of My Ownin search of a freedom beyond her home.