Book Club: Yellowface by Rebecca F. Kuang

Previously best known for her award-winning fantasy series The Poppy War Trilogy, Rebecca F. Kuang scored a major hit when her fourth novel, Babel, was released last year. The historical fantasy — set at Oxford University in the 1830s and inspired partly by Kuang’s own time studying both there and at Cambridge — shot to the top of bestseller charts and became the talk of the increasingly influential online space known as BookTok.

Kuang’s latest looks set to repeat that success with Yellowface, a book which represents something of a stylistic departure for the Chinese-born, American-raised author. As she has put it, where Babel was her “big ponderous Dickensian bildungsroman”, Yellowface ‘”is a zippy, ridiculous thriller meant to imitate the roiling schadenfreude of watching a Twitter meltdown”.