Yellowface/Rebecca Kuang

This is an impressive novel recommended by Harriet Gilbert on A Good  Read and presently Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime.

The story is of an unsuccessful writer Juniper Hayward who is friendly at Yale with a far more successful one – Athena Liu.

She meets up with her buddy in Washington DC who, whilst making pancakes, chokes to death. Juniper decides to take her manuscript of The Last Front, the story of Chinese labourers in World War One, edit it and offer it for publication.

It is an instant success, a best seller, but she is outed on social media for her duplicity.

As a white woman she is also castigated as a racist. Juniper writes a second novel Mother Witch again modelled on Liu’s writings but this leads to her undoing.  She falls apart particularly as someone tweets as the ghost of Athena Liu and Juniper thinks she recognised  the actual Liu.  It’s clear she is having a breakdown but there is a malevolent impersonating Liu.

The story bears some resemblance to Jean Hanff Karelitz’s The Plot in which a creative writer tutor plagiarises the fiction of one of his pupils now deceased and is outed too on social media.

Although Junie Hayward is certainly no angel and has committed a deceitful act and abused a friendship she does not deserve the bile directed towards her on social media – the thrust of which is that as a non-Chinese she should not be writing of the mistreatment of Chinese labourers.

The novel also illustrates the workings of the publishing industry in the digital age.

Kuang studied in both Oxford and Cambridge and is an adept writer. Unlike ‘ Adult Work’  I was absorbed by the book which I finished in two days.