I read an excerpt in the Times (Sat 10 Feb) and would love to read the whole book. (However, due to my weird personal preferences I shall wait for the paperback.)
It's written beautifully, and you're inside the main character's head straight away. It's a novel about a Chinese girl who comes to England and is trying to learn English. Each chapter starts with a definition from her Chinese-English dictionary, and the term or phrase defined then comes up in the chapter. One example is the word "guest", which an English guy then uses, saying "be my guest" and she takes it literally, with interesting results.
Obviously this isn't just about language but also about culture. I was interested to find that she needed to learn the English niceties - e.g. he offers her a cup of tea, she says, no, I don't want tea, I want coffee; which to English ears sounds brash, so he teaches her to say things like, I'd love a cup of coffee. This is interesting to me as an Israeli, as we also don't have these niceties. My husband once asked me how to say in Hebrew "What would you like to drink?" - we don't; we say, What do you want? (or more likely, just "Coffee?")
Anyway, I urge you to read this book - for very selfish reasons, as only if enough people buy it will it ever get published in paperback.
