My Battle of Hastings

One of the most valuable writers in the world, Deborah Levy, explores embodiment, assimilation, and integration—concepts that seem to represent a stage or state to achieve in life. In winter 2021, Xiaolu Guo moved into a tiny dilapidated flat on the Hastings seafront, a room of her own where she could write away from her domestic duties as a mother and wife in London. As Russia invaded Ukraine, she immersed herself in the English landscape and its past, particularly the violence between Normans and Saxons.

"My Battle of Hastings" is a chronicle of Xiaolu's life in Hastings and a portrait of a dislocated artist seeking to connect with her local environment in hopes of finding a deeper connection to her adoptive nation. Filled with profound, beautiful, and wry reflections on war, history, migration, and belonging, Xiaolu's journey into the past completes the triptych of memoirs that began with "Once Upon a Time in the East," which charted her childhood in China, and continued with "Radical: A Life of My Own," in search of a freedom beyond her home.

"My Battle of Hastings" is above all an exploration of how an immigrant, an outsider, and a woman can embrace local and national history.