But the Girl

Yu’s masterly debut follows an Australian Malaysian woman awarded a scholarship to visit the U.K., where she attends a month-long residency to work on a postcolonial novel. The unnamed narrator goes on leave from her literature PhD studies and settles in Scotland, where she meets other artists in the program, most of whom are white, and struggles to fit in. One, named Clementine, befriends her, but also mocks her in front of their peers by suggesting she knows something about the disappeared Malaysia Airlines flight MAS370: “Are you covering something up for the government? We can’t trust them. How can we trust you?” The group also complains about popular artists getting “cancelled” over their racism. Clementine further disenchants the narrator by offering thoughtful feedback to others, but focusing her critique of the narrator’s work on the narrator’s “diverse” identity. After a bout of writer’s block, the narrator eventually begins writing about her parents’ lives and how they came to Australia, drawing inspiration from her belief that as a second-generation immigrant daughter it is her responsibility to carry and preserve her family’s difficult past. Zhan’s bildungsroman brims with striking insights and fully realized characters, exploring with nuance and self-deprecating humor the fraught reality of navigating academic and artistic spaces as a woman of color. This signals the arrival of a bold new voice. (Mar.)