PhD candidate Alice Law has accidentally murdered her professor while studying at Cambridge. The only obvious solution (to her) is to descend into Hell and retrieve his soul, so he can pass her before she graduates. The only thorn in her side is Peter Murdoch, her pushy academic rival, who insists on going to Hell with her.
This is all I want to reveal about Katabasis, because the less you know going in, the better.
R F Kuang has already established herself as a masterful world-builder in the fantasy genre, but this book has some of her best characterisation EVER! Alice is the most tragically heartbreaking protagonist I have read in a long while. Through flashbacks, Kuang reveals how Alice has convinced herself into cooperating with (and even loving) the thankless, harsh demands of academic life and the micro-aggressions of being a woman at Cambridge.
For fans of dark academia, this book feels even denser than Kuang’s Babel. The entire magic system is constructed around paradoxes and Euclidean geometry, and there are multiple references to everyone from Dante to Aristotle. You don’t have to have a thorough knowledge of philosophy going in but, be prepared for complex writing. Also, her depiction of Hell is both wildly creative and absolutely terrifying.
Just when I thought the book couldn’t get any better, Kuang delivered the most satisfying climax and resolution I could have dreamed of. Absolutely a five-star read, and a must for lovers of dark fiction.
Reviewed by Rachel Denham-White
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rebecca F. Kuang is the #1 New York Times and #1 Sunday Times bestselling author of The Poppy War trilogy, Babel: An Arcane History, Yellowface, and Katabasis (forthcoming). Her work has won the Nebula, Locus, Crawford, and British Book Awards.
She has an MPhil in Chinese Studies from Cambridge and an MSc in Contemporary Chinese Studies from Oxford. She is now pursuing a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale, where she researches Sinophone literature and Asian American literature.
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