Rebecca F Kuang has followed her bestselling “dark academia” novel Babel with a zeitgeisty thriller set in the world of publishing that tells the tale of two young novelists in Washington DC. There’s Athena Liu, a critical and commercial darling who has just signed a deal with Netflix, and green-eyed frenemy Juniper Hayward, whose debut has already been forgotten, the paperback publication axed owing to poor sales. The novel starts with the pair toasting Athena’s success in her ritzy apartment after a night on the town; Juniper, our narrator, is choking down her resentment when, suddenly, Athena is literally – and fatally – choking on a homemade pancake…
It’s a freak accident whose sheer unbelievability sounds the keynote for a novel circling the slipperiness of truth, but most of all it gets the motor running on the novel’s plot, a brazen literary heist. Athena had just shown Juniper her secret new manuscript – an epic novel about the Chinese workers recruited by the British army in the first world war, drafted on a typewriter (“no Word backups, no Google Docs, no Scrivener”, which is to say, no plot holes here, OK?). In the subsequent blur of events, from 911 call to tear-stained Uber ride home, Juniper spirits away the stack of pages then just can’t help publishing it under her own name, rebranded as June Song (Song being her middle name, given by her hippy mother).
