I love a good page-turner, don’t you? The promise that you’ll read, “Just one more paragraph,” easily turns into, “Just one more chapter,” until you realize you’re late to start dinner, and have easily read half of your book. If you are on the lookout for your next great read and are wondering what to read next, I recommend Yellowface by R.F. Kuang. I started this novel the day after we posted the Top 5 Books We Loved in 2023, and finished it within 24 hours.

Published in May, 2023, Yellowface by R.F. Kuang, was selected as the July 2023 Book of the Month of Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club.

Even Stephen King praised it on X, where he said the novel was, “Hard to put down, harder to forget.”

What to Read Next: Page-Turner Please

Yellowface is a novel about two friends, Athena Liu and June Hayward, who are both writers. Athena is super successful, and June, not so much. When June witnesses Athena’s accidental death, she steals Athena’s completed manuscript, and publishes it as her own.

What happens next is a series of events that take June further and further into trouble, with no clear nor easy way out.

Why you will love Yellowface by R.F. Kuang

As the writer R.F. Kuang says in the Acknowledgements of this novel, “Yellowface is, in large part, a horror story about loneliness in a fiercely competitive industry.”

If you love stories about friendship rivalries, crime, and suspense, then you will love this book. You will also appreciate the deeper questions this book poses regarding cultural appropriation as well as get an inside look into the dark side of publishing. If you’re also a writer, you will definitely appreciate the latter.

If you do dive into the novel, let me know in the comments below. I’d love to hear your thoughts!

-Marilyn