Xiaolu Guo sweeps into the Scottish Power Studio Theatre. The author and film maker is here to promote her new novel UFO in Her Eyes, set in a small Chinese fishing village, similar to the one where Guo grew up before moving to Beijing to study art.

Guo wrote six Chinese novels before moving to the UK five years ago, and this is her second English-language novel. She describes this incredible accomplishment as both a linguistic and an identity shift.

With another reader, Guo evocatively performs an interview from her novel between a police detective and a peasant woman. For her eighth novel, Guo tells us that she chose the banal reporting style of a police investigation (they're investigating a town where aliens have allegedly been sighted) to contrast with the more poetic peasant language. The novel uses this very effective linguistic clash of fact and emotion, along with the alien theme to illuminate dramatic recent social changes in China.

Guo describes the rapid shift to modernity in China - from no televisions to mobile phones and Facebook within a few years - as exclusive. She compares the rush of modernity with the German occupation of France, in the sense that it came upon ordinary people, who had to adapt. People unable to afford the education required to exist in modern society seem to fade away. Her novel is about social rejects, and a fading community.

The author seems irritated by a question regarding the status of women in China. She indicates that she's asked this frequently, on the assumption that she is more oppressed than European women - a notion she rejects. On the other hand, Guo welcomes a question on communism, which she describes as a romantic ideal with some positive features. She describes her own politics as on the fence.