Rebecca Kuang was quietly writing cult classics for years before she hit the best-seller lists with Babel, a Victorian fantasy based on colonialism and opium wars, and Yellowface, a deliciously dark story about literary plagiarism and the ego-smashing right hook that social media can administer. Then came Katabasis, skewering academia and the exploitation of naive students.

The breadth of Kuang’s knowledge reflects her high-achieving CV, which takes in Cambridge, Oxford and Yale. Taipei Story explores her identity as a Chinese- American. It relates the experience of Lily, a Yale student attending an intensive summer course in Chinese language and culture in Taipei. Taiwan is easier to visit than mainland China, and Lily hopes to become fluent in Mandarin and able to converse with her maternal grandparents.

Her struggles will be familiar to any high-flyer who has excelled effortlessly for years and is then rudely awakened by a subject that eludes them. Kuang eloquently captures the difficulties of being away from loved ones in a completely new environment, having to adapt to relentless heat, poky living conditions and people with whom you wouldn’t choose to mix.

The descriptions of Taipei itself, the course and Lily’s personal life are so vivid one suspects they are based on first-hand experience, and there is mention in the Acknowledgements of an inspirational teacher whom Kuang once had. The narrative is propulsive, compelling and at times funny: ‘Why have the mosquitoes targeted us? Was it our burger-fed American blood?’ And:

Many of the students were infatuated with [Teacher Lin] and they kept flirting with her between classes. I wondered what it was like to be flirted with by people who were bad at your language. I this weekend discovered a secret. Yes – a café for cats! Do you like as well, the cats?

Elsewhere, Lily compares a white boy speaking perfect Chinese to ‘watching a dog dance the salsa’.

Her family is dysfunctional, but she has learnt not to dwell on problems she can’t solve. This, and her candour and perspicacity, make for engagement – we begin to care deeply about Lily.

Kuang is sharply attuned to current mores, but prefers satire to lecturing – reminiscent, in this respect, of her fellow American writers Kiley Reid and Curtis Sittenfeld, who have also written wonderful campus novels. I loved this idiosyncratic coming-of-age story.