Guest review by Hazel Gaynor: YELLOWFACE by Rebecca F Kuang

 

"A clever, dark, witty, provocative story that I devoured in a couple of days ..."

Photograph by Fran Veale

Hazel Gaynor is an award-winning, international bestselling author of historical fiction. Her debut, The Girl Who Came Home was a New York Times bestseller, and her most recent book, The Bird in the Bamboo Cage, was shortlisted for the 2020 Irish Book Awards Popular Fiction Novel of the Year, and was a national bestseller in the USA, where it is published as When We Were Young and Brave. Her latest novel The Last Lifeboat is out now. Hazel’s work has been translated into seventeen languages and is published in twenty-three countries to date. Originally from Yorkshire, she now lives in Ireland with her family.

The premise of Rebecca F Kuang’s Yellowface is seductively simple: would you steal someone else’s manuscript and pass it off as your own to gain literary success? Talk about a hook!

Kuang’s 2022 historical fantasy Babel was a global bestseller, and her follow-up, Yellowface, is … absolutely nothing like it! Part murder-mystery, part publishing industry satire, Yellowface is a clever, dark, witty, provocative story that I devoured in a couple of days. I’m a very slow reader so this is a very good sign.

Through her two brilliant protagonists, Athena Liu and June Hayward, Kuang not only navigates the moral conundrum of plagiarism, but also addresses complex issues of toxic friendships, cancel culture, and the highly topical question of cultural appropriation that has been raised many times in the publishing industry in recent years.

Athena Liu and June Hayward are occasional friends (although even that is in doubt), both of them writers, but who have experienced very different ends of literary success. Through these brilliant constructed characters, Kuang takes a scalpel to the mysterious inner workings of the publishing industry. Authors will laugh (and cry) in recognition of their own experiences and frustrations, and may even discover some uncomfortable truths about the publishing industry which they were not aware of. As an author reading Yellowface, it feels like having the most excellent gossip with all your author friends and I know there will be many WhatsApp group chats filled with quotes from particularly pertinent passages. Readers outside the publishing industry will be equally enthralled by the dastardly goings-on of June Hayward, aka Juniper Song.

For anyone in a reading slump, or looking for a palette cleanser from their usual genre (whatever that is), this is the perfect book. It rips along and keeps you guessing until the very end. I read the book as a proof, and am planning to buy it in at least one of its many special editions. The Waterstones hardback edition with typewriter sprayed edges (could it be any more perfect?) is definitely going on the ‘never to be lent to anyone’ shelf. A fast-paced, whip-smart literary thriller, Yellowface is sure to be a huge hit this summer. I absolutely loved it. 

Athena Liu is a literary darling and June Hayward is literally nobody.

White lies
When Athena dies in a freak accident, June steals her unpublished manuscript and publishes it as her own under the ambiguous name Juniper Song.

Dark humour
But as evidence threatens June’s stolen success, she will discover exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.

Deadly consequences…
What happens next is entirely everyone else’s fault.

Yellowface is published by The Borough Press.