by R. F. Kuang
4.3 · 4 reviewsA scorching satire of literary ambition: one stolen manuscript, one lie, and a slow unraveling no one can look away from.
June Hayward and Athena Liu came up through the publishing world together, but only one of them became a star. June's debut sank without a trace; Athena landed every deal, prize, and glossy magazine feature an author could dream of. So when Athena dies suddenly in front of her, June makes a decision she can almost justify to herself: she takes Athena's just-finished, unpublished manuscript home.
What follows is a meticulously crafted, deeply uncomfortable rise. Rebranded and repackaged, June reinvents herself as a literary sensation, riding a wave of acclaim built on someone else's work and a carefully blurred sense of who she is allowed to be. But the industry that hands out success is the same one that thrives on takedowns, and the questions start small before they start to circle.
Told entirely from June's own self-serving, endlessly rationalizing point of view, this is a razor-sharp examination of authorship, race, jealousy, and the machinery of online outrage. It is as propulsive as a thriller and as squirm-inducing as the worst comment thread you have ever read.
First published in 2023.
4 reviews
I appreciated what it was doing more than I enjoyed reading it, if that makes sense. Spending the whole book inside June's head is the point, but it wore me down. Worth reading for the conversation it starts, just not a comfortable ride.
Every chapter I thought, surely she can't justify THIS too, and somehow she always does. It is a thriller about a stolen manuscript on the surface and a takedown of an entire industry underneath. Smart and mean in the best way.
Kuang absolutely nails the way the internet eats people alive. The Twitter pile-ons gave me secondhand stress. It loses a little steam toward the back third for me, but the voice carries it the whole way through.
I read this in one sitting and felt vaguely guilty the entire time. June is one of the most infuriating narrators I have ever met, and the genius is that you keep understanding exactly why she does what she does. The publishing satire is brutal and very, very funny.