Yellowface

Rebecca F. Kuang The Borough Press £16.99

Literary envy and a stolen manuscript make for tantalising ingredients in any narrative but Kuang turbocharges her slippery thriller by adding scathing riffs on the likes of cancel culture and tokenism, blowing the lid off the publishing industry while she’s at it.

Its narrator is smart, embittered June Hayward, whose debut novel has sunk, while the career of her classmate, AsianAmerican Athena Liu, soars. When Athena dies in a freak accident, June filches her work-in-progress and passes it off as her own. Pacy and provocative.