YELLOWFACE, by Rebecca F Kuang (Blue Door, $35)
In this thrilling black comedy, June Hayward, a young European writer of middling success, strikes literary gold when her former classmate and much more successful counterpart, Athena Liu, dies choking on a pancake, leaving behind an unpublished manuscript that Hayward steals and passes off as her own.
The manuscript in question, “The Last Front”, is a historical fiction war epic centred on the untold story of Chinese labour corps