The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai

Ruiyan Xu was born in Shanghai and moved to the USA at the age of ten. She graduated from Brown University and lives in Brooklyn, New York. The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai is her first novel.

'An engrossing novel that will enchant you from beginning to end' David Ebershoff, author of The 19th Wife 'Intelligent and thoughtful ... skilfully examines the complex relationship between language and identity, seeing beyond the words themselves to the way in which they mould our thoughts and shape our personalities ... A novel which makes us think beyond our boundaries' Clare Morrall, author of Astonishing Splashes of Colour 'What a gem of a debut. This is the most literary kind, rarely found in fictions about new China. There is such deep silence in her prose, hinting at the depth of human suffering, anguish and hope. A gifted novelist, she gives us the insight into a Shanghai that is at once strange and familiar, old and new, creating a literary landscape for its dwellers that is vast and beguiling, which is precisely the spirit of this metropolis, and of this fine fiction' Da Chen, author of Brothers 'From the explosion of its first pages to the searing emotion of its last, The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai is a novel that burns with the heat of clashing cultures and love transformed. Ruiyan Xu is a wonderful writer with a perfect ear for both the words and the silences that define us' Peter Manseau, author of Songs for the Butcher's Daughter