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?). 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. 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… 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. R ebecca 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.
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