Reading it is rather like finding yourself in a dream: "once upon a time..." People are going to like this book very much' Doris Lessing
Coral and her slacker boyfriend, Red, live on the ground floor of a tower block in the megalopolis that is twenty-first-century Beijing. Red thinks jobs are for idiots and just wants to play Frisbee; Coral makes ends meet by working in a video rental shop. They eat fast food, try to ignore the claustrophobia of having twenty-five storeys above them, and lose themselves in sex. But then, one day, someone sends Coral a dried eel through the post. As the smell of the sea floods her small flat, she is transported back to the fishing village where she grew up - the Village of Stone she has tried so hard to forget. This haunting, beautiful novel tells the story of one little girl's struggle to build a life for herself against all odds. At the same time it is an incisive portrait of China's new urban youth, who have hidden behind their modern lifestyle all the poverty and cruelty of their past.
Author Biography
Xiaolu Guo was born in a fishing village in the south of China in 1973. She was awarded an MA in Film from the Beijing Film Academy in 2000 and has worked as a novelist, essayist, screenwriter and filmmaker. Having studied documentary film at the National Film and Television School in London, she now lives in Berkshire and is working on a new novel. Her most recent documentary The Concrete Revolution has been screened at the Raindance Independent Film Festival, the Oxford International Documentary film festival and the New York film festival.
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