Voss is White’s best-known novel, a historical fiction based on the German
explorer Ludwig Leichhardt’s failed expedition across Australia.
The novelconveys
both the determination and uncertainty of the colonial project in the
mid-nineteenth century. In places I was horrified by its grotesque depictions
of suffering in the outback, but it is also a beautifully written text that
captures the explorer’s yearning to understand the land and Australia’s failure
to recognize Indigenous personhood – in both the nineteenth century and when
White writes in the 1950s.
I return to the novel’s imagery whenever I think
about the outback or frontier in literature and culture.
Voss describes an epic journey, both physical and spiritual. The eponymous hero, Johann Voss, is based on Ludwig Leichhardt, the nineteenth-century German explorer and naturalist who had already conducted several major expeditions into the Australian outback before making an ambitious attempt to cross the entire continent from east to west in 1848. He never returned. White re-imagines his story with visionary intensity. Voss's last journey across the desert and the waterlogged plains of central Australia is a true 'venture to the interior'. But Voss is also a love story, for the explorer has become inextricably bound up with Laura Trevellyn,…
This is a very affecting novel that brings together the irony and
frivolity of social media with the overwhelming joy and sadness of caring for a
seriously ill child.
The first half captures perfectly the throwaway and
absurdist content of Twitter humor; the second half I found to be an unexpectedly
moving portrait of a young woman coping with family tragedy. I can’t think of a
novel that better depicts the experience of being ‘too online’.
'Patricia Lockwood is the voice of a generation' Namita Gokhale
'A masterpiece' Guardian
'I really admire and love this book' Sally Rooney
'An intellectual and emotional rollercoaster' Daily Mail
'I can't remember the last time I laughed so much reading a book' David Sedaris
'A rare wonder . . . I was left in bits' Douglas Stuart
* WINNER OF THE DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE 2022 *
* SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2021 *
* SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2021 *
* A BBC BETWEEN THE COVERS BOOK CLUB PICK *
______________________________________________
This is a story about…
This novel is
a hilarious indictment of publishing and social media. Kuang takes on the voice
of unsuccessful white writer June who steals, develops, and publishes her dead
Asian friend’s unfinished manuscript.
What I loved about Yellowface is
how it plays with the reader’s allegiances, at times making June a sympathetic and
insecure underdog and at other times using the confessional voice to reveal her
brazenness, resentment and white fragility.
The No. 1 Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller from literary sensation R.F. Kuang
*A Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick*
'Propulsive' SUNDAY TIMES
'Razor-sharp' TIME
'A wild ride' STYLIST
'Darkly comic' GQ
'A riot' PANDORA SYKES
'Hard to put down, harder to forget' STEPHEN KING
Athena Liu is a literary darling and June Hayward is literally nobody.
White lies When Athena dies in a freak accident, June steals her unpublished manuscript and publishes it as her own under the ambiguous name Juniper Song.
Dark humour But as evidence threatens June's stolen success, she will discover exactly how far she…
Hannah Lauren Murray shows that early US authors repeatedly imagined lost, challenged, and negated White racial identity in the new nation. In a Critical Whiteness reading of canonical and lesser-known texts from Charles Brockden Brown to Frank J. Webb, Murray argues that White characters on the border between life and death were liminal presences that disturbed prescriptions of racial belonging in the early US. Fears of losing Whiteness were routinely channelled through the language of liminality, in a precursor to today’s White anxieties of marginalisation and minoritisation.
