Once Upon a Time in the East cover art

Once Upon a Time in the East

A Story of Growing Up

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Once Upon a Time in the East

By: Xialou Guo
Narrated by: Tina Chiang
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About this listen

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Short-listed for the Costa Biography Award.

Short-listed for the Jhalak Prize.

Short-listed for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2018.

A Sunday Times Book of the Year.

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

When she is born in 1973, 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.

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.

©2017 Xialou Guo (P)2019 Audible, Ltd Asia China
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i love this authors work. it is so raw and beautiful. it touches your soul

Beautiful

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I loved this book so much I wanted it to continue as I was totally immersed. It was read so well I imagined it was the author’s voice telling me her story. What an amazing person she must be to go through such difficult years and become a successful writer with no hint of self pity.

A harsh life gently told.

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