A memoir of growing up in modern China from the Orange-shortlisted and Granta Best Young British Novelist.

*Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award 2017*
*Shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award 2017*
*Selected as a 2017 Book of the Year in the Sunday Times*

Xiaolu Guo meets her parents for the first time when she is almost seven. They are strangers to her.

When she is born in 1973, her parents hand her over to a childless peasant couple in the mountains. Aged two, and suffering from malnutrition on a diet of yam leaves, they leave Xiaolu with her illiterate grandparents in a fishing village on the East China Sea.

Once Upon a Time in the East takes Xiaolu from a run-down shack to film school in a rapidly changing Beijing, navigating the everyday peculiarity of modern China: censorship, underground art, Western boyfriends. In 2002 she leaves Beijing on a scholarship to study in Britain. Now, after a decade in Europe, her tale of East to West resonates with the insight that can only come from someone who is both an outsider and at home.

'This generation's Wild Swans' Daily Telegraph