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Yellowface

A Novel

by R. F. Kuang

Narrator Helen Laser

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Length 8 hours 39 minutes

Language English

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Bookseller recommendation

“I hated every character in this book but could not put it down. It was so compelling and truly made you think about how awful people can be. The main character basically murdered her friend and stole her manuscript. Wanting the celebrity that her friend afforded, she is overwhelmed with the publishing world. Such great storytelling”
— Suzanne • Page 158 Books

Bookseller recommendation

“R.F. Kuang does it again! But honestly, who is surprised! Yellowface is full of terrible people doing terrible things, a horror of mundanity that makes you reconsider everyone around you. But mainly, you have June spiraling out of control in a similar manner to the main character in a tell-tale heart, an unreliable narrator who reliably tells on herself in every single sentence. I was on edge the entire time, desperate for something to go right for someone who wasn't the main character - one of my favorite kind of things in fiction. Yellowface is brilliant, and a stark reminder that we all need to be better.”
— Caitlyn • Bookmarks

Bookseller recommendation

“Equal parts modern satire, indictment of the publishing industry, and twisted ghost story, R. F. Kuang’s first foray into literary fiction pulls no punches and will have you reading late into the night.”
— Abby Bennsky • Old Town Books Texas

Bookseller recommendation

“Two writers. Friends. Or friendly. One on a superstar trajectory, the other flailing. One Asian. The other white. When the superstar Asian writer dies, her friend takes her work in progress about the history of Chinese Labor Corps in WW1 and publishes it to great acclaim. This is a journey into the mad, bad world of publishing and cultural appropriation. Fast-paced, well-written, and topical. ”
— Em • A Great Good Place for Books

Bookseller recommendation

“One afternoon, I picked up this book intending to read a chapter or two only to find myself completely engrossed with this fast paced, quick witted tale for the rest of the night! I finished it the following morning. I found the unreliable narrator to be really compelling and I was intrigued by the scathing take down of the publishing industry. This book delivers! Easily a 5-star read! ”
— Zinna • A Great Good Place for Books

Bookseller recommendation

“Are you curious about how the book publishing industry works? Yellowface explores the publishing world from the point of view of an envious, unlikeable character; who at the core is battling loneliness, grief, and failure. I love the way the story unfolds from an extremely one-sided voice, who doesn't understand how her actions impact others. What I'd like to see: Athena's POV! ”
— Jenny • E. Shaver, bookseller

Summary
About the author

#31 in Bestselling Fiction - Literary Audiobooks

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A REESE'S BOOK CLUB PICK

“Hard to put down, harder to forget.” — Stephen King, #1 New York Times bestselling author

White lies. Dark humor. Deadly consequences… Bestselling sensation Juniper Song is not who she says she is, she didn’t write the book she claims she wrote, and she is most certainly not Asian American—in this chilling and hilariously cutting novel from R.F. Kuang, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Babel.

Authors June Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars. But Athena’s a literary darling. June Hayward is literally nobody. Who wants stories about basic white girls, June thinks.

So when June witnesses Athena’s death in a freak accident, she acts on impulse: she steals Athena’s just-finished masterpiece, an experimental novel about the unsung contributions of Chinese laborers during World War I.

So what if June edits Athena’s novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song—complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? Doesn’t this piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller? That’s what June claims, and the New York Times bestseller list seems to agree.

But June can’t get away from Athena’s shadow, and emerging evidence threatens to bring June’s (stolen) success down around her. As June races to protect her secret, she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.

With its totally immersive first-person voice, Yellowface grapples with questions of diversity, racism, and cultural appropriation, as well as the terrifying alienation of social media. R.F. Kuang’s novel is timely, razor-sharp, and eminently readable.

Fiction Fiction - Literary

Rebecca F. Kuang is the #1 New York Times and #1 Sunday Times bestselling author of the Poppy War trilogy, Babel: An Arcane History, and Yellowface. Her work has won the Nebula, Locus, Crawford, and British Book Awards. A Marshall Scholar, she has an MPhil in Chinese Studies from Cambridge and an MSc in Contemporary Chinese Studies from Oxford. She is now pursuing a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale, where she studies diaspora, contemporary Sinophone literature, and Asian American literature.