A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers heralds the American debut of a remarkably gifted young writer.

Twenty-three-year-old Zhuang, the daughter of shoe factory owners in rural China, has come to London to study English. She calls herself Z because English people can’t pronounce her name, but she’s no better at their language. Set loose to find her way through a confusion of cultural gaffes and grammatical mishaps, she winds up lodging with a Chinese family and thinks she might as well not have left home. But then she meets an English man who changes everything. From the moment he smiles at her, she enters a new world of sex, freedom, and self-discovery. But she also realizes that, in the West, “love” does not always mean the same as in China, and that you can learn all the words in the English language and still not understand your lover.

Drawing on her diaries from when she first arrived in the UK, Xiaolu Guo winningly writes the story in steadily improving English grammar and vocabulary. Freshly humorous, sexy, and poignant, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers is an utterly original novel about language, identity, and the cultural divide.</p>

郭小櫓，1973年生於浙江溫嶺石塘鎮漁村，18歲就讀北京電影學院，獲學士及碩士學位，寫劇本，做電影導演，發錶小說和影評，齣版有文集《電影地圖》、《電影理論筆記》，小說《芬芳的37°2》、《我心中的石頭鎮》和電影劇本《我媽媽的男朋友是誰》等。2002年起旅居英國，至今拍瞭六部長短片，包括紀錄北京申奧期間的《嵌入肉體的城市》，獲法國巴黎“國際人權影展”大奬、描寫城鄉及歸鄉情結的《今天的魚怎麼樣？》，獲2007年法國 Créteil“國際女性影展”評審團大奬，以及藉由雙親的東西行旅透視文化衝突的新片《西行之路》等。