Impostor Syndrome by Kathy Wang, 2021

Julia Kall’s mother abandons her in a Russian orphanage. Through a clever trick she comes to the attention of higher-ups and parlays that into a release from the orphanage and an eventual computer science degree. On graduating she’s trained by Russian intelligence, after which she’s given stolen American technology and worms her way into in Tangerine, a Facebook-like company in Silicon Valley. She rises to be chief operating officer, then she goes to work. Alice Lu also works for Tangerine, brought in as part of an acquisition made by Julia. One day Alice runs a security audit, and notices unusually high outbound traffic from a server in Dublin. She logs the anomaly, setting the story in motion.

When I finished The American Senator by Anthony Trollope I wanted there to be a Trollope for today. Kathy Wang isn’t that — she’s not as expansive and is much less polite — but she is as sharp an observer and knows how to weave a good story through complicated subtexts. Impostor Syndrome isn’t (or isn’t only) a spy or corporate-espionage thriller, it’s a social (and, at the end, political) story of the kind Tom Wolfe wanted writers to produce. Wang’s satire is keen and exacting, even when her targets are barn-sized in their broadness, and her humor is slightly tilted to reveal the irony, which makes it all the more pointed and wicked, yet still deft.