We are delighted to announce that for September’s Text Book Club, we will be discussing Xiao Hai’s Adrift in the South.

The book club will be held upstairs in our Reading Room at 10am on Sunday 20th September, and is suitable for ages 18+. Tea and coffee will be provided.

To book your ticket, please click HERE, or to purchase a year-long subscription to our Text Book Club, please click HERE.

About the book - When Xiao Hai turned fifteen, his family paid a vocational-school teacher 1,200 yuan to find him a factory job in Shenzhen. So began fifteen years spent moving between the garment mills and electronics factories of China's fast-growing southern cities. Adrift in the South is a memoir of life as a migrant labourer in the twenty-first century, making iPhones and baby clothes, hand-stitching football shirts and cutting plastic into radios.

Here, Xiao Hai reveals the alienation and tedium of factory life, the small indignities and indifference of the larger system. And he tells the story of how poetry led him somewhere unexpected: to join a small community of artists living, working, and studying together on the outskirts of Beijing.

This memoir is a landmark text from China's migrant worker literature movement, a grassroots group of writers providing an unvarnished account of what life is like for the 300 million migrant workers powering the world's second-biggest economy.