“I get bored really easily,” Kuang says, an array of books on the shelf behind her, next to what looks like a fluffy toy cat. Unlike her previous historical fantasies, it is strikingly topical: it includes sensitivity readers, Twitter pile-ons and professional jealousies thinly disguised as socially minded critique. Kuang drafted Yellowface in the summer of 2021, a time of lockdown “when all the isolation and desperation and depression was reaching a peak”. There’s magic, there’s intrigue, and there’s imperial England, grand, glittering and increasingly troubling to some of the students, who find themselves struggling to simply go to the balls and sip the champagne. That was followed by the bestseller – and runaway BookTok hit – Babel, which follows a group of language students at Victorian-era Oxford University who get drawn into the first opium war. Many events in the trilogy are inspired by 20th-century Chinese history: like her historical counterpart, Rin battles occupiers from a neighbouring island in the east builds a guerrilla peasant insurrection, complete with a long march through the country and spars with a more established rival backed by western powers.

Kuang first made her name with the Poppy War trilogy, an award-winning fantasy series that explores the idea, as she puts it, “what if Mao had been a teenage girl?” Set in a country resembling medieval-era China, it tells the story of Rin, an ambitious girl from the southern peasantry who enters the nation’s most prestigious military academy. An Instagram post earlier this year shows the 26-year-old author holding up an early copy of the book, showing its eye-catching lemon yellow cover it is captioned “in 2023 we get mad spill the beans and don’t care”. In the novel, which tells the story of a white writer who claims a dead Chinese friend’s manuscript as her own, the industry’s dark side is satirised with delicious cynicism: how authors are questionably packaged and marketed how bestsellers are often selected in advance and boosted with money long before they hit the shelves and how marginalised authors and staff are ignored, belittled and underpaid. Her new thriller, Yellowface, could only have been written by an author familiar with the idiosyncrasies of the publishing industry: its petty politics, its bad faith, its best intentions gone hilariously awry. Then again, she wouldn’t have been able to. “I f I were a debut writer, I wouldn’t have dared to write this book,” Rebecca F Kuang says from her home in Boston.

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