June Hayward (Juniper Song)

June Hayward is the morally complicated protagonist of R.F. Kuang's satirical novel Yellowface — a struggling white author who witnesses the sudden death of her more successful Chinese-American friend and fellow writer Athena Liu, and who in the immediate aftermath of the accident takes Athena's unpublished manuscript about Chinese laborers in World War I. June publishes the novel under a slightly modified name, passes it off as her own work, and watches it become the kind of success her own writing has never achieved.

Kuang writes June with a specific kind of psychological precision — June is self-aware enough to know what she has done and skilled enough at self-justification to keep doing it, constructing elaborate rationales for her theft that she almost believes. The novel is a savage satire of publishing industry racism, literary gatekeeping, and the specific ways white mediocrity is validated while non-white excellence is ignored.

Yellowface operates simultaneously as a thriller (as June's secret threatens to unravel), a social satire, and a psychological character study of someone choosing to do something wrong and living with that choice. Kuang's anger is precise and her comedy is devastating.

A standalone novel.