Why am I tempted to say ‘this is a sweet little book’? It’s no such thing and anyway, I don’t say things like that but I’m trying to figure out how Xiaolu Guo has cunningly disguised an unusual and important piece of work as a sweet little book.

The rare and quiet determination of someone who decides to start belonging to a new country and sets about learning the history she’s supposed to know, and gets herself a flat on Hastings seafront in order to have some time to herself to do the reading… starting with the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle… is quite a formidable thing.

I live in Hastings and for those who don’t, I have to say that Guo has brilliantly portrayed the wonderful ordinariness (or possibly the ordinary wonder) of doing what I so often do, which is wandering around Hastings pondering life, the universe and, in particular, Hastings.

And not many people do so with a backdrop of newly discovered news stories from the Anglo-Saxon days, culminating in the Battle of Hastings.

Does it matter if you live in a country without having the same background history floating around in the back of your brain that others do? Well, maybe it does. My other half’s Scottish which, you’d think, wouldn’t make an appreciable difference as our countries are intermingled neighbours but even so we are sometimes brought up short when we don’t read a situation the same way and it turns out to be because we don’t have the same history, stories, songs in our back brains.

I think having that history brand new and at the front of your brain might be something else though. This is (an abridged version of) one of my favourite bits of Guo’s book, when she’s thinking about refugees, the ‘hostile environment’, ‘stop the boats’ and so on…

Such a cruel policy – how could any politician in a democratic country try to pass it without any shame? Or… If only the British government had used the same measure to deal with the Channel crossing a thousand years ago … there would never have been a Battle of Hastings, and there would never have been a generation of French chevaliers stealing English lands … thus creating a new class system which seems to have become the everlasting social structure of the English society.

Whether Guo is exploring an ancient church or buying cheese, whether she’s dealing with a double-glazing fitter or introducing herself to the Bluetits on the beach, her re-tellings of her days all contribute to the creation of this brilliant little, sweet little, UXB.

If you live in Hastings, read it. If you don’t, please read it anyway, and tell me how it reads from the outside.

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