Ingrid Yang, a PhD student in modernist literature is trying and failing to put together her final dissertation piece on the revered Chinese American poet, Xiao Wen Chou, a poet she never wanted to study in the first place. Amidst her academic woes, she stumbles upon a ground-breaking secret, one that balloons into a full-fledged campus scandal, threatening to shake the very foundations of the otherwise becoming Barnes University.

Disorientation seeks to disrupt and destabilise reader perceptions, disorienting Orientalism and on this front I think it succeeded. I found it to be a contentious yet comedic character study and a bold debut.