JTA — A bestselling author is facing a flurry of anger from fans after advance copies of her upcoming novel identified a character as Israeli — a move that her critics say advances “normalization” of a country they oppose.

Rebecca “R. F.” Kuang, the Chinese-American author of the 2023 satirical novel “Yellowface” and “The Poppy War” trilogy, is set to publish her seventh novel, “Taipei Story,” in September. The advance version, an excerpt of which was leaked on social media on Sunday, includes a short scene involving an Israeli musician.

The musician, a successful pianist whose performance ignites a near-religious fervor for a character in the story, is not named, and the text identifies him as “a dour-faced man who did not so much as crack a smile as we applauded.”

That was enough to trigger some readers and potential readers who said Kuang was whitewashing Israel in the wake of the war with Hamas in Gaza — even as she has previously expressed support for the movement to boycott Israel.

“RF kuang had 190 countries to choose from to write about a character’s nationality and she still chose to write about the one who’s actively committing gen0cide against Palestinians for years,” user alltoowellreads wrote on X, in one representative comment that has been shared nearly 1,000 times that used an online version of the word “genocide” meant to evade censors.

Others railed against the excerpt on Threads, where there is a thriving community of people discussing books. Some readers said they even canceled their preorders of the book.

Kuang and her publicists did not respond to requests for comment, and she has disabled comments on her recent Instagram posts, where she has not addressed the criticism.

The backlash to Kuang’s inclusion of the Israeli character reflects a trend in the literary world, in which even minor mentions of Israel or Israelis are enough to land authors on boycott lists.

The trend predates the most recent war in Gaza: Casey McQuiston, the author of the 2019 romance novel “Red, White, and........

© The Times of Israel