Katabasis: New from the SUNDAY TIMES best-selling author of BABEL and YELLOWFACE: the INSTANT No.1 SUNDAY TIMES best-seller from the author of YELLOWFACE
R.F. Kuang, the author behind Babel and Yellowface, returns with something altogether stranger and more exhilarating. Katabasis takes its name from the Ancient Greek word for a hero's journey into the underworld, and it earns every syllable of that premise. Alice Law is a grad student with singular ambition: to become the foremost mind in analytic magick. The problem? The one person who could truly advance her career is dead. Worse, he's in Hell. So Alice, dragging along her most infuriating rival Peter Murdoch, goes to retrieve him. What follows is fantasy at its most gleefully unpredictable. Hell here bears little resemblance to philosophical speculation; its logic is inverted, its rules unreliable, and survival depends entirely on Alice and Peter finding a way to cooperate despite every instinct pushing them towards mutual destruction. The tension between them crackles throughout, equal parts antagonism and something neither is quite ready to name. The Guardian called it 'a big, bold fantasy romp', and that captures the tone well without quite doing justice to the wit underneath. Kuang writes with real intelligence and a sharp sense of humour, and the romantic undercurrent sneaks up on you in the best possible way. One of the BBC's top 25 books of 2025, Katabasis is a confident, frequently surprising novel that confirms Kuang as one of the most compelling voices working in fantasy fiction right now.
- Author: R.F. Kuang
- Publisher: HarperVoyager
- Genre: Fantasy
- ISBN: 978-0008501877
- Pages: 560 pages