UFO in Her Eyes

Description

A tale of the unexpected from Orange Prize shortlisted Xiaolu Guo, also named as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists 2013. Silver Hill Village, 2012. On the twentieth day of the seventh moon Kwok Yun is making her way across the rice fields on her Flying Pigeon bicycle. Her world is turned upside down when she sights a UFThing - a spinning plate in the sky - and helps the Westerner in distress whom she discovers in the shadow of the alien craft. It's not long before the village is crawling with men from the National Security and Intelligence Agency armed with pointed questions. And when the Westerner that Kwok Yun saved repays her kindness with a large dollar cheque she becomes a local celebrity, albeit under constant surveillance...

Xiaolu Guo was born in China. She published six books before moving to Britain in 2002. Her books include- Village of Stone, shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize; A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, shortlisted for the Orange Prize; and I Am China. Her recent memoir, Once Upon a Time in the East, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award and the Rathbones Folio Prize 2018. It was a Sunday Times Book of the Year. Her most recent novel A Lover's Discourse was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize 2020. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a visiting professor at the Free University in Berlin.

Guo's humour is bracingly ironic and tinderbox dry * The Times * A fast moving, barbed polemic...a sharp little book in which the legacy of the Cultural Revolution shimmers and festers... A writer to read, a writer who makes every word count * Irish Times * A breath of the freshest air imaginable. She cuts through the smog of hype and platitude -- Boyd Tonkin * Independent * Sprightly... the comedy is neatly poised... a damning portrait of totalitarian China * Scotland on Sunday * The novel resonates in revelations of loss and pain * Guardian *