Two friends, Anthea Liu and June Hayward. Together they dreamed of becoming bestselling authors. Anthea's dream came true, June's debut novel flopped.

Now Anthea's dead and June has the only copy of her unfinished new manuscript.

I like books about authors writing or stealing manuscripts, Until I Met Her by Natalie Barelli being a favourite. Yellowface brings in expansive racial and moral issues, a heavy dose of publishing industry inside knowledge and lives lived under social media spotlights to create something very original and exciting.

Anthea Liu's fiction niche was historical Asian traumas and June must try to reinvent and rebrand herself to try and pass Anthea's manuscript off as her own work.

There are big conscience issues for June, and a minefield of public appearances, author events and twitter trolls to navigate. Will she cope with the stress? How will she follow up the Stolen masterpiece?

Describing it as a 'darkly funny literary thriller' is much more fitting than a 'crime thriller'.

Difficult to categorise and impossible to put down, I raced through it in one sitting, thoroughly entertained and I learned a few things too.

Very highly recommended. Sharp, funny and insightful.

Thanks to Netgalley HarperCollins UK

Such a brilliant read and the best book package I have seen forever. A wonderfully shocking, funny, toe curling read - and the most fabulous publishing setting. One of the best protagonists with her world view soaked into every page. And that ending - *chef’s kiss* Deserves to fly!

R F Kuang has done it again. A really enjoyable piece of literature which brings to light how corrupt the publishing industry can be. It was such a complex topic to feature for a book and I really appreciate how both Juniper and Athena were portrayed. It was an important discussion to have and I hope the discussion carries on further away from the book.

This one was actually quite difficult to rate for me. I thought the concept was great (realistic af and relatable in a lot of ways) but because we are reading this from June’s perspective, it became tedious really quickly. I think if you’re gonna have strongly unlikeable characters, it’s really difficult to have them carry the whole book because no one wants to hear their whiny perspective for 300 pages.
I also feel like with this type of character, it works better if you’re either supposed to hate them throughout, or empathise with their humanity. I don’t think either side was chosen for June which made me even more reluctant to keep reading about her shitty choices and pity parties.
I came across the word vitriol so many times I think I’d be happy to never see it again lol.

Yellowface is brilliantly written and extremely clever. It will have obvious appeal to anyone interested in the world of book publishing and taking a peak behind the scenes. A genuinely unique read.

Two friends who have the same dreams and are doing the same things, basically living parallels lives. When one is doing better than the other, at what point do they start hating each other?

Juniper and Athena went to school and graduated together with the same dreams, but Athena starts living the dream, with best selling books and a Netflix contract, while Juniper has one book that nobody is reading. How far would Juniper go to have her dream life and take everything she thinks is her right even if that means she has to take it from Athena.

This book is easily one of the hardest and scariest books I’ve ever read, the most brilliant nonetheless.
The hardest because every page I was stunned by the level of audacity of all the characters towards what was happening, and the scariest because some people are actually like that in real life. It really shows how the prejudice is so deep in the society that every time someone “different” says or does something other people don’t agree on, they jump to racism, homophobia and xenophobia, or go even deeper to say they are the victims when called out.

It be may be a satire, but it shows how some cis het white people think they are entitled to every space there is and other people can only occupy them when they allow it even though they don’t think they are privileged.

If Rebecca F. Kuang writes it, I’ll be reading it no questions asked!

Rebecca Kuang's novel Yellowface is a book about the publishing industry, race, mental health and how the three coincide. The novel follows June Haywood, who writes under the racially ambiguous name, Juniper Song.

The novel outlines the peculiar relationship between June and Athena with their irregular meet-ups. But with no close friends, it does appear that they are closest to each other, despite their distance. Upon witnessing Athena's death, June takes the manuscript of The Last Front, a novel that follows the Chinese labor force in the first world war.

After June works through the manuscript and gets it published, the novel follows the fall out ad repercussions of June's actions in an interesting commentary of the publishing industry.
All of Kuang's characters are easy to dislike. To begin with the main character, June is short-sighted, jealous, arrogant, and clearly lacks morality. While there are moments that seemed forgiving on June, that is down to June being the narrator for Yellowface, making all perspective unreliable. Athena is dislikable in another way. We gain an understanding of her brilliance, "quirky, aloof, and erudite," but she appears remorseless in her drive for a good story. Moreover, June makes us understand that Athena is somewhat naïve about her success, not understanding that June is jealous. Candice is a smaller character who is dislikable too. She behaves unprofessionally, while correct in her thinking, resulting in the loss of her job and a vendetta. Everything that Candice fights for, she undermines by the end of the novel too.

Yellowface is a deeply impressive novel that I devoured in a couple days. I was enthralled by its thriller aspects with the theft and fraud, and the more psychological elements with social media. Kuang has written in a lot of dark themes, discussing June's sexual assault and panic disorder, the racism and slurs of asian and white people, as well a graphic death of Athena very early on. I have read nothing quite like Yellowface before and can not wait to see it on the bookshelves. The cover is very clever and I am super thankful to have received an ARC.

After reading and loving Babel I had high expectations for Yellowface and it did not disappoint. It’s very different in genre and tone, but Rebecca’s formidable intellect and identification of critical social issues shine through once more.

This contemporary novel follows the snide character of June Hayward, an author who has not had the success she’d hoped for. Her friend Athena Liu has been phenomenally successful and June has begrudgingly remained friends with her.

When Athena dies in a freak (but very funny) accident, June steals the manuscript of her next book, changes her name to the racially ambiguous Juniper Song, and publishes it herself to great success.

What follows is a fascinating expose of racism in the publishing industry and online, and a real page turner.

What’s so brilliant about the book is that whilst neither June or Athena are particularly likeable, I was compelled by their story and the book.

Really pleased to have had an advanced copy via netgalley and I’ll be looking out for a sprayed edges version of the book when it’s released.

This is such a difficult book to review - is it incredibly smart and satirical, or does it just miss the mark? I think for me this was a book of two halves. The first half is very pacy and sets up lots of interesting ideas. At this point I was totally onboard with the whole premise and thought it was clever and well-plotted. Unfortunately, the pace drops off in the second half and it gets a bit repetitive. It’s still going to make a big splash when published and I will read whatever Rebecca Kuang publishes next.

After a celebratory night of drinking, June witnesses the death of her college friend, beautiful, successful, Athena Lui. June takes home Athena unfinished manuscript, and we begin a story about publishing and plagiarism, cultural identity and internet pile-ons, personal pain and ownership of stories. I ADORED this book, so smart and insightful and thought provoking. June is both horrendous and sort of sympathetic, and I found myself groaning, wincing and laughing in equal parts up to the tense climax of this amazing story.

Very grateful for recieving this arc from Netgalley. Yellowface was so powerful and I was obsessed with it! I could not put it down, I was hooked. R.F.Kuang is one of my favourite authors because her messages in her books are portrayed so strongly and she writes about issues that I shoved under the rug in society such as racism towards the Asian community, and the privileges in the publishing world. The characters were perfectly written and complex, morally very misaligned. I truly loved this book.

the prose fell really flat for me and overall the concept of the book -- a satire of the publishing industry and the marginalisation of asian writers -- was not executed well. the satire was too hamfisted and largely unfunny, and i wish the characters had been more fleshed out rather than simply being mouthpieces for whatever message the author was trying to convey.

thanks to netgalley for providing this arc in exchange for an honest review!

I have a really hard time reading books with unlikeable protagonists, and boy was June unlikeable. But it just shows that Kuang's beautiful writing and storytelling kept me hooked. I did have to put it down a couple of times out of second-hand embarrassment for June but only for a couple of days because I had to know what happened next. It was such a fascinating look into the publishing world as well as an incisive and delightful unpacking of jealousy.

I think it might take weeks, maybe months, for my thoughts to coalesce into something cohesive with this book, but I will try and get them in order now.

"Yellowface" is a compulsively readable, mildly horrifying, low-key panic attack of a novel. There were plenty of times I felt myself starting to hyperventilate with the hurricane of shit that was happening. Every time I thought we were nearing the end, that we were hurtling towards a positive resolution - we took another turn downwards. And that's the point! If you come out of this book feeling uncomfortable, I think you're on the right track.

June, our main character, is insufferable, which again is kind of the point. Unreliable to a T, she perfectly embodies the cut-throat world of professional publishing and writing - you look out for yourself and you do whatever you can to stay relevant. In fact, none of the characters in this book are particularly pleasant to read about, which probably reflects modern life more than other novels. You can see the links to real life people - she never takes responsibility for harm she's caused, she insists, over and over again, that she's doing the right thing even when she questions it privately. And the whole Twitterati / cancel culture aspect is eerily familiar. I have my own issues with the entire concept of cancel culture (consequence culture is far more apt), but Kuang has captured it with a brace, sharp accuracy - enough to make your skin crawl a bit.

If you like R.F Kuang - if you read Babel or the Poppy War - you're probably not going to get on with this book. And you can see that from Goodreads reviews from the last year, where people have come out of this mildly shell-shocked. Because R F Kuang and Rebecca F Kuang are basically two different iterations of the same person. Maybe this will be a marmite book - you either hate it or you love it. With first person narrative, it's always hard to separate author from character, but I think I had a better reading experience because I'd had no prior interaction with her work. I may be more tempted now because her writing is just FANTASTIC, but don't go into this expecting the same as her other work. It's very different.

I will also say - didn't see the twist coming, even though it was right there, throughout. You can read this for the satire OR you can read this for the fantastic writing and just let yourself be swept along with the story. It was really hard to put it down at times; I felt fully absorbed by this masochistic story of a writer. There were also some amazingly truthful passages about writing that were like a punch to the gut:

"Writing is the closest thing we have to real magic. Writing is creating something out of nothing {...} writing gives you power to shape your own world when the real one hurts too much."

and

"But, I've found that jealousy, to writers, feels more like fear."

I think anyone who is pursuing writing - in any medium - will feel those lines deeply. I'll be thinking about this book for a long time.

An incredibly creepy telling of the publishing industry and it's issues when it comes to supporting diverse authors and tokenisation. This book is from the POV of June Hayward, a white woman who dons yellowface after her friend Athena (who is a best selling Chinese author) dies horrifically, and steals her unfinished works to publish for herself. It is crafted so well that, as a white reader, I found myself second guessing every phrase June utters... is that as innocuous as it seems, or just covert layers of microaggressions? The way June never fully takes responsibility for her role in this plot is eerily real to life and many marginalised people would recognise their oppressors in this character - I also think a lot of non-Asian readers, but especially white readers, may see some of their own choices and lack of education in some of the phrases June word vomits at any given chance. Hopefully this both is cathartic to those who needed it, but also a wake up call to others.

when it comes to this author and her work I have learned not to question her ability to make me hungry for her work because I will in fact, devour it the first chance I get. how RF Kuang managed to make me like this book while also sending me through rage and frustration spirals is beyond me, I'm not going to lie, I was a little skeptical about how this would play out on the page and even now, I don't think I struggled as much to come up with a rating like I have for this book. all I know is that I could not stop reading.

there were so many moments where I definitely facepalmed and/or rolled my eyes at the narrator's decisions and inner monologue but considering this book is almost entirely a satirical work, I'm not surprised. my anxiety levels did hit different peaks while reading this book so that was interesting. still not sure where I stand on the ending because it didn't really feel like a conclusion, in my opinion.

definitely pick this up though because wow.

'Babel' was one of my favourite novels of 2022; 'Yellowface' is ostensibly a very different type of story but deals with many of the same ideas relating to language, power and racism.

The premise of this satirical literary thriller is not dissimilar to Jean Hanff Korelitz's 'The Plot' as it features one struggling writer stealing the work of another who has an untimely end; the story then follows a predictably Faustian trajectory as their initial meteoric success is followed by a moment of reckoning which leads to their downfall. However, Kuang complicates this plot by having white American writer June Hayward steal the manuscript of her Asian-American contemporary Athena Liu's novel about the Chinese Labour Corps during WW1 after witnessing Athena's rather bathetic death by choking on a pancake. Thus this becomes a novel not just about authorship but about privilege, exploitation and who has the right to tell which stories.

First and foremost, this is a brilliantly unputdownable thriller which keeps us guessing with a number of unexpected twists, particularly in the final chapters as June becomes increasingly haunted and paranoid. The plot is also full of ironies - for instance when June (a liberal Biden supporter) is taken up as a cause by alt-right culture warriors ("It appears the alt-right cares a lot about due process, but only when the accused has done something like sexual assault or racially motivated plagiarism"). Kuang's depiction of social media pile-ons is incisive and she brutally skewers the hypocrisy of a publishing industry concerned above all with sales and reputation management.

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of this novel is Kuang's handling of June's narrative voice. June spends most of the novel justifying her actions - she is saving Athena's work from obscurity, it needed her input in order to be ready for publication, as a white writer June has been unfairly overlooked - and at times we start to buy into these rationalisations, but then the mask slips and we are reminded of how awfully June is really behaving - for instance, when she publishes her version of Athena's novel under the ethnically ambiguous name Juniper Song and then positions herself as a victim by asking 'Isn't it racist, in a sense, to assume my race based on my last name?'- or when she imagines a film based on their story: 'Florence Pugh will play me. That girl from Crazy Rich Asians will play Athena.' Moments like these are subtle and infrequent enough that June remains a believable character, but they nonetheless serve to highlight how entrenched racist stereotypes and attitudes remain in today's society and culture.

This is a great read which deserves to be one of the most talked about novels of 2023. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for sending me an ARC to review.

This has to be the most close to the bone, eviscerating take-down of the publishing industry ever. It’s so sharp and at times I found myself physically wincing at how true to life the satire is. I also found myself thinking about it deeply. It’s a triumph, though I do wonder how much people outside of publishing will relate to it. Having said that the social media elements are incredibly strong too - everyone will take something from this.

Yellowface is fast-paced and a scathing indictment of the publishing industry and the institutions it unknowingly (or knowingly) upholds.
Kuang is searing in her words, spoken through an unreliable narrator. It makes you questions the books you've read, who has written them and what agendas they hold.
This novel felt like walking through a haunted house - my blood was pumping and I didn't know where the next jump was coming from.
I am intrigues to see how this book enters the world. It is bound to stir up discourse aplenty amongst the internet - but perhaps that's exactly what the publishing industry needs.

Was this book getting five stars even a question? Well if it was, it shouldn't have been.
Taking on a different genre to her previous fantasy epics, R F Kuang delivers a darkly humorous contemporary story with unlikeable but engaging characters. Although Yellowface does not have the emotional weight that Babel had, this is still a wonderful read and deals with modern issues around publishing and diversity tokenism.
Thank you to NetGalley and HarperCollins UK for this eARC in exchange for an honest review!