"Sorry for my English. Everything English so scientific and problematic. Unlucky for me because my science always very bad in school, and I never understanding mathematics. First day, already know I am loser."

This is the mangled English that the A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers is written in, as narrated by the 23-year-old Zhuang Xiao Qiao, known as Z to Westerners, as she arrives in London for a year to study English.

It tells the story of her life in a city where everything is new and foreign, where the most precious reminders of her old life are gone, she gradually makes a place for herself.

A process Guo describes through Z's steadily improving English. Word by word, month by month, her insight into this new culture grows until, at the cinema, she meets an older Englishman, a part-time sculptor, and embarks on a relationship that will change the way she sees the world.

At the heart of the book is a love story between Z and her English boyfriend, a 44-year-old, ex-anarchist, bisexual vegetarian who lives in Hackney and doesn't like to talk about his feelings. What begins as a blossoming of love, sex and freedom gradually finds Z questioning the different ways in which each views their life together.

While I'd like to criticise the author for creating a leading character that so easily looses her cultural identity and sense of self in a middle aged man of doubtful worth, Guo has written an inventive, often humorous and poignant story of a woman's journey over cultural and emotional borders.

Z is merely a vehicle, used by the author, to explore being English, living in English and understanding English when you are not. The book's strength lies in its "bad" English and the acute observations of Z between the "I" and "them" that is emphasised by the use of grammar, tense and sentence structure.

"We saying things simple way. No verb-change usage, no tense differences, no gender changes. We bosses of our language," says Z.

It is also socially acute in it's observation of how the Asian mind is being colonised by western traditions and psyche.

A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers was short listed for the 2007 Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction.

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