A Lover's Discourse

A story of desire, love, language, and the meaning of home set against the backdrop of Brexit London—from the award-winning author of Nine Continents.

A Chinese woman moves from Beijing to London for a doctoral program—and to begin a new life—just as the Brexit campaign reaches a fever pitch. Isolated and lonely in a Britain increasingly hostile to foreigners, she meets a landscape architect and the two begin to build a life together.

A Lover's Discourse is an exploration of romantic love told through fragments of conversations between the two lovers. Playing with language and the cultural differences that her narrator encounters as she settles into life in post-Brexit vote Britain, the lovers must navigate their differences and their romance, whether on their unmoored houseboat or in a cramped and stifling apartment in east London. Suffused with a wonderful sense of humor, this intimate and tender novel asks what it means to make a home and a family in a new land.

"Through her precise and unflinching language, a revealing account emerges of how one mind opens to another, how it processes each decision and moment of wondering." —USA Today
"A fragmentary meditation on the nature of love, on desire and on connection between two humans . . . sets off cross-cultural echoes with the lightest of strokes." —The Guardian
"Unlike Roland Barthes' book by the same name, Xiaolu Guo's A Lover's Discourse is a love story as a genuine dialogue, not only between lovers, but between languages, cultures, and philosophies. Swift, astute, and funny." —Siri Hustvedt, international–bestselling author