By Rebecca F. Kuang, this was published in 2023. I opted for the audio-version (having seen it recommended by AudioFile), and Helen Laser's performance was indeed brilliant. This is definitely a story to listen to.

So we have two young, female, American writers. June Hayward (who later starts to write under the more Asian-sounding name Juniper Song) is white, and struggling; her career has just not taken off. Athena Liu, on the other hand, is Asian-American, and wildly successful as a writer, rapidly landing huge advances, tons of good publicity, and a Netflix deal. On a personal level, neither woman is exactly blossoming. June has issues with her mother, and finds her sister a bore; Athena doesn't really seem to be close to anyone (and -- we find out later -- there is a bit of a mother-problem going on there too).

So when the two women meet to mark said Netflix deal, June wonders whether Athena has no-one else to celebrate with... They have a few drinks at a bar, and then go home to Athena's very smart pad, where they have a few more drinks. Then someone has the idea of making pancakes. Pandan pancakes, to be precise, which seems a shame, as I love pandan (pandan anything), and therefore it's disappointing to hear that it's a pandan pancake that Athena chokes on...

Because, yes, Athena dies. Right there in Chapter 1. There's no spoiler here. The book's very first sentence reads: "The night I watch Athena Liu die, we're celebrating her TV deal with Netflix."


Hong Kong, 2018. Athena was "born in Hong Kong, raised between Sydney and New York, educated in British boarding schools that gave her a posh, unplaceable foreign accent"...

Despite what's later rumoured, we've no reason to think that June is responsible for this death in any way. Athena chokes. June calls 911, having failed to successfully execute the Heimlich manoeuvre (and how many of us could be sure we'd have done better?).

June's culpability, however, begins at the point where she leaves Athena's apartment with the manuscript her dead friend has just completed...

This is all set up to be fool-proof. Athena insists on working with note-books and a typewriter. She's very secretive about her work until it's finished. So there's no trail of any description. How realistic this scenario is I don't know, but we go along with it, because it gives June the chance to pass off Athena's manuscript off as her own. It's entitled The Last Front, and it's about the Chinese Labour Corps, which comprised tens of thousands of Chinese workers recruited by the British Army to be sent to the front during World War I.

June works herself down through a labyrinth of self-deception to ease her conscience. She's rescuing a first draft from oblivion; she's completing a text, in whose original whole paragraphs were left just in note form; she's tidying and trimming... She insists: "There was never a moment when I thought to myself, I'm going to take this and make it mine." Yet that's what happens...



And it opens up many rich plotlines.

First, there's the "will she get caught?" element, giving the book a thriller quality. (And just as June seems to have successfully got away with one heist, we find out there's more...)

Second, a kind of psychological-cum-ghost-story thread develops. Try as she might to justify her actions, June feels guilty, and this guilt increasingly messes with her mind. She starts to "see" the dead Athena, which makes her vulnerable to those who are out to get her.



Third, there's an exploration of what exactly plagiarism is. Clearly, what June has done counts as plagiarism. However much she personally contributed to the final product, she's passing off as her own something that wasn't. Yet there are grey areas. When writers share ideas, how do you make sure that helpful cross-fertilization doesn't stray over into something more dubious? Derivation is difficult... We're all so much more influenced by each other than we sometimes realize. And what about Athena? Was she plagiarizing when she ruthlessly wrote up other people's stories (which they'd confided to her in good faith, and often in the midst of emotional trauma)?

And fourth, and most productively, there's the whole difficult business of who gets to tell whose story... As people increasingly start to talk about June's work, the following objections come to the fore: June is white, so she shouldn't be writing through the eyes of Chinese subjects; June is white and privileged, so she shouldn't be profiting from the pain of others, or selling troubled Asian pasts for white entertainment.


I'm sure lots of objections could be raised about my illustration choices...

These questions are never entirely resolved. Kuang, after all, is an Asian writer who is telling this story through the eyes of a white woman... Athena, her character, was a highly privileged Asian writer: Was it OK for HER to be profiting from the pain of others? June's view is that without authors, these narratives wouldn't be put before the public, and it's wrong to dictate who can tell any particular story. Which seems to represent Kuang's view too. She says in an interview: "I think that a lot of our standards about cultural appropriation are language about -- don't write outside of your own lane. You can only write about this experience if you've had that experience. I don't think they make a lot of sense. I think they're actually quite limiting and harmful and backfire more often on marginalized writers than they push forward conversations about widening opportunities. You would see Asian American writers being told that you can't write anything except about immigrant trauma or the difficulties of being Asian American in the U.S. And I think that's anathema to what fiction should be. I think fiction should be about imagining outside our own perspectives, stepping into other people's shoes and empathizing with the other. So I really don't love arguments that reduce people to their identities or set strict permissions of what you can and can't write about. And I'm playing with that argument by doing the exact thing that June is accused of -- writing about an experience that isn't hers."

This is all true, but it also somewhat glosses over the discrepancies of power that have accumulated over the centuries. An account by a white person looking through the eyes of an Asian person is (I would say) always likely to have a co-opting, proprietorial quality that is different from an account where the situation is reversed... There's a weight of history that can't be ignored...

However that may be, when June submits her manuscript, and then works on it with an editor, we're given a richly ironic description of how an Asian text is effectively butchered... And all with so much justification, so much persuasive editorial rationale... Nothing should be too challenging for readers, after all...

The same thing happens with the discussion of a possible film, with the rights guys clearly plotting to extract even more Asianness from the movie version.

Candice, a Korean-American editorial assistant, and June's principal detractor, claims: "This industry is built on silencing us... and hurling money at white people to produce racial stereotypes of us." There's definitely truth in that. Which is why you wince when now-famous June tells Emma, her Asian-American mentee: "It's easier now than ever to be Asian in the industry," especially as Emma "ticks every checkbox on the list". Easier now than ever to be Asian if you do what the industry wants, perhaps, and tick off a checkbox that you've had no input into establishing... As Kuang says, "We know from industry reports every year it's still overwhelmingly in your advantage to be white in publishing. But we see over and over again white writers adopting monikers that make them sound Asian or make them sound non-white or have different backgrounds. That makes me wonder -- what is it about a different racial identity that can be commodified and turned into something that makes you exotic and special and marketable?"

So, it's a mess, really. It's definitely good that we have questions of cultural authenticity out in the open, and can discuss cultural appropriation, aka "cultural leeching". I'm sure "sensitivity readers" are probably a good idea, and it's a red flag when June obdurately refuses to work with one.

But the -- sadly believable -- accounts of how people hurl themselves into these arguments (often in the most blinkered, self-righteous, and cruel ways) are horrifying. Social media are ubiquitous in this book, and much as you can understand the objections of June's critics, you just don't want to see her brought down by these Twitter-heroes.

Users' fickleness becomes doubly obvious when at one point Athena too becomes a target for online white-haters, and is posthumously "cancelled", because she's too much of a banana, and has gone out with white men... Not that Kuang wants us to admire her creation. She says in an interview: "Athena is my worst nightmare. She’s all the things I hope will never be true of myself. And it’s because she has learned very early on in her career that she can get a lot of attention by telling a particular kind of story, which is the story of Asian pain. So she has benefited immensely from acting as a cultural broker, depicting Chinese-American stories in a certain way to maximize the attention and interest she gets from it. Which means that she also is deeply suspicious of all other Asian creatives." Good point, but then, when right-wingers start piling into the discussion -- in support of poor white June -- your stomach kind of turns...



In general, this book offers a fascinating -- and quite scary -- insight into the way publishing works these days. What's depicted is really very, very unattractive. There's the mine-field of the world of publicity (with the rise of things like book subscription boxes, which I'd never heard of, but sound awful). And the whole personality cult that surrounds contemporary publishing gives food for thought, as Sally Rooney also reminds us. "Best sellers are chosen. Nothing you do matters," says June.

The serious themes don't stop this being a really riveting listen. From the beginning you know that the narrator has done something wrong. But to some extent you're towed along by her justifications. You keep hoping for some sort of genuinely redemptive act. Yet, by the end, she's just this incorrigible person, who can't help battening herself onto Asian people, and sucking the stories out of them... It's a good ending, though. Every time you think June has finally been laid out, she seems to rise again. This will never end, while the power lies where it lies...

Drawn in though I was -- by the story and by the complex denunciation of "yellowface" -- I had two problems with the book. The first was the character of June/Juniper, who is for lengthy stretches beguilingly believable -- only to then produce, time and time again, something so outrageously stereotypical that you baulk. The second was my suspicion -- despite listening with rapt attention -- that the whole thing was perhaps too long. We kept reaching climaxes -- and then finding out there was more. Partly, that's the nature of the beast (June just won't stop doing what she's doing). But I wondered if a more even arc would have worked better.

Overall, though, a mesmerizing story. And I will certainly read more by this author.