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

Deborah Levy's My Battle of Hastings is a exploration of how an immigrant, outsider, and woman can embrace local and national history. Xiaolu Guo moved into a tiny dilapidated flat on the Hastings seafront in winter 2021 and immersed herself in the English landscape and its past, especially the violence between Normans and Saxons. The book is 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.

Format: Hardback
Length: 208 pages
Publication date: 01 August 2024
Publisher: Vintage Publishing

Deborah Levy's My Battle of Hastings is a profound exploration of the experiences of an immigrant, outsider, and woman as she embraces 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 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 Hastings is 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 began with Once Upon a Time in the East, charting her childhood in China, then continued with Radical: A Life of My Own in search of a freedom beyond her home.

Weight: 318g
Dimension: 323 x 224 x 28 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781784745370