Yellowface

Description

The explosive New York Times, Sunday Times, and global smash-hit bestseller! From Rebecca F. Kuang, the #1 bestselling author of Babel and The Poppy War, comes Yellowface—a razor-sharp, darkly humorous, and completely addictive literary thriller. Taking the internet and BookTok by storm, this brilliant contemporary satire targets cultural appropriation, diversity politics, the cutthroat world of traditional publishing, and the toxic underbelly of social media cancel culture.

Authors Juniper Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars graduating from Yale together. But while Athena has become a celebrated literary darling, June can barely secure a paperback deal. “Who wants stories about basic white girls?” June bitterly thinks. So when June unexpectedly witnesses Athena’s shocking death in a freak home accident, she acts entirely on a desperate impulse. She steals Athena’s just-finished, handwritten masterpiece—an experimental historical novel detailing the unsung, tragic contributions of Chinese laborers during World War I.

So what if June heavily edits Athena’s rough manuscript and sends it to her own literary agent as her original work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her pen name as the ethnically ambiguous “Juniper Song”—complete with a carefully lit, racially vague author photograph? This vital piece of history deserves to be told, regardless of who tells it. That is exactly what June convinces herself to believe, and the prestigious New York Times bestseller list quickly agrees.

But as the money, fame, and critical acclaim roll in, June finds herself utterly trapped in Athena’s inescapable shadow. Rumors begin to swirl on Twitter and Reddit, and emerging evidence steadily threatens to expose her stolen success. As June races against the clock to protect her dark secret at all costs, she discovers exactly how far she is willing to go to keep the elite life she thinks she truly deserves.

Masterfully executing the psychological thriller, literary satire, toxic friendship, and stolen identity tropes, Yellowface delivers a fast-paced, unputdownable narrative packed with dark humor, moral ambiguity, and an unsettling, close-up look at modern internet culture.