English cover art

English

A Novel

Preview
LIMITED TIME OFFER

3 months free
Try for £0.00
£8.99/mo thereafter. Renews automatically. Terms apply. Offer ends 31 July 2025 at 23:59 GMT.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.

English

By: Wang Gang
Narrated by: Michael Sun Lee
Try for £0.00

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Offer ends 31 July 2025 23:59 GMT. Cancel monthly.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

Confirm Purchase
Pay using card ending in
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.
Cancel

About this listen

In the tradition of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, Wang Gang's English is a captivating coming-of-age novel about the power of language to launch a journey of self-discovery. When a new teacher - a tall, elegantly dressed man from Shanghai carrying an English dictionary under his arm - comes to Urumqi, the capital of China's far west region of Xinjiang, 12-year-old Love Liu turns away from Chairman Mao's little red book and toward the teacher's big blue book for answers to his most pressing questions about love and life. But as a whole new world begins to open up for him, Love Liu must face a test more challenging than any he'll take in the classroom.

©2009 Wang Gang (P)2009 Penguin
Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction China

Listeners also enjoyed...

Red Scarf Girl cover art
Old Land, New Tales cover art
The Palest Ink cover art
The Woman Who Breathed Two Worlds cover art
What the Night Sings cover art
I'll Be Right There cover art
Pig's Foot cover art
A Hundred Flowers cover art
The Elephant Chaser's Daughter cover art
I Will Have Vengeance cover art
Bliss cover art
Winter Journey cover art
The Rent Collector cover art
The Color of Our Sky cover art
Before the Rains cover art
The End of Loneliness cover art

Critic reviews

"I loved this book and can't stop talking about it...Transcendent." (Carolyn See, The Washington Post)

"Equally tender and searing... More than any other book I've read about Communist China. English conveys a sense of the time and place with clarity, authenticity and compassion." (Tiffany Lee-Youngren, The San Diego Union-Tribune)

"Deftly explores the politics of language during those treacherous times." (Travel + Leisure)

No reviews yet