Guo's 2008 novel, "A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers", is the first one that she wrote in English after publishing her Chinese books. It tells the journey of a young Chinese woman in London. She soon renames herself "Z" and her encounters with an unnamed Englishman spur both of them to explore their own sense of identity. The novel is written in the heroine's broken English to begin with, in a dictionary form. With each chapter her English gradually improves, reflecting the improvement of the heroine's own English over the year in which the novel is set. American writer Ursula Le Guin reviewed the book in "The Guardian": "We're in the hands of someone who knows how to tell a story [...] It succeeds in luring the western reader into an alien way of thinking: a trick only novels can pull off, and indeed one of their finest tricks."