Katabasis

A Novel

An Audiofile Earphones Award Winner, featuring dual narration from Morag Sims and Will Watt

Dante’s Inferno meets Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi in this all-new dark academia fantasy from R. F. Kuang, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Babel and Yellowface, in which two graduate students must put aside their rivalry and journey to Hell to save their professor’s soul—perhaps at the cost of their own.

Katabasis, noun, Ancient Greek:

The story of a hero’s descent to the underworld

Alice Law has only ever had one goal: to become one of the brightest minds in the field of Magick. She has sacrificed everything to make that a reality: her pride, her health, her love life, and most definitely her sanity. All to work with Professor Jacob Grimes at Cambridge, the greatest magician in the world.

That is, until he dies in a magical accident that could possibly be her fault.

Grimes is now in Hell, and she’s going in after him. Because his recommendation could hold her very future in his now incorporeal hands and even death is not going to stop the pursuit of her dreams….

Nor will the fact that her rival, Peter Murdoch, has come to the very same conclusion.

With nothing but the tales of Orpheus and Dante to guide them, enough chalk to draw the Pentagrams necessary for their spells, and the burning desire to make all the academic trauma mean anything, they set off across Hell to save a man they don’t even like.

But Hell is not like the storybooks say, Magick isn’t always the answer, and there’s something in Alice and Peter’s past that could forge them into the perfect allies…or lead to their doom.

Finish it.

The first half of the book I hated the characters, felt stupid and single minded but I’m glad I pushed through. There is real character development here. I was drawn towards this book because review comparing it to Piranesi. This is an unfair comparison. Piranesi made the bland horrifying and this book makes hell bland and boring but the characters are the highlight. At first I could find nothing to like about either and that’s half the point. We’re human we make mistakes at every turn and the author highlights this like I’ve never read before. These mistakes shape the person, molding them in a way that highlights the depth of an individual. Worth the read.

Fabulous exploration of humanity via fiction

Kuang is such a good author! Fleshed out characters you hate and love and see yourself in.

Academics find themselves in hell

The growth of the characters was a lovely heart warming story which was at odds with the cold academic hell that was the hell these two kids envisioned in their walk.

A compelling read, if somewhat strange performance

Dante's gate proclaims: "Justice incited my sublime Creator; created me divine Omnipotence, the highest Wisdom and the primal Love." In Katabasis, the same irony holds: an institution meant to embody wisdom and the love of knowledge becomes its own hell, convincing Alice and Peter that the most rational choice is to sell half their lifespan for the privilege of descending into the underworld on behalf of their thesis advisor and a tenure-track job. What Dante framed as eternal punishment appears here as just another rung on the Oxbridge ladder, where damnation feels no more absurd than writing one more dissertation chapter.

The novel's middle section becomes a punishment in itself: circular, exhausting, and (presumably) deliberately claustrophobic. It mirrors the Sisyphean treadmill of Oxbridge life, those anxieties, insecurities, and masochistic ambitions that keep you grinding away in these apparently insane British institutions of higher learning. If Hell is other people, as Sartre claimed (and as Kuang cheekily inscribes on the outer cover of the deluxe edition), she sharpens the point: Hell is also your colleagues, your thesis, and your looming publication deadlines.

Though at times the subject matter and Alice's endless anxiety spirals drag, I found myself lifted back up by Kuang's lush prose and frankly dazzling intellect. I've seen some review complaining about her tendency to over-explain or philosophize at length, but honestly? This book is unapologetically written for those who do want to know what Aristotle thought about celestial space worms and I'm not mad about it.

The flaws are real, though. The pacing drags in places, and Kuang leans too heavily on telling us what we already know about her characters' inner lives. YES, Alice has imposter syndrome; YES, Peter is a tortured genius - we get it. These repetitions grow tedious when they could have been sharpened through action rather than exposition, something that Kuang almost certainly is capable of.

Yet despite these quibbles, Katabasis stands as another ambitious, impressive work from an author who continues to challenge me. I'll definitely be keeping my eyes peeled for her next one.

My one note on the performance, however, is the baffling choices made in the audio performances. Our narrator is a compelling reader, but with a questionable command on American accents, which made all of Alice's dialogue feel strange and affected. Some of the male voices were just goofy in their performance ,and then very oddly in the last chapter, a male voice is piped in for characters who the female narrator had otherwise voiced. Overall, this was still a compelling performance, but it was sometimes distracting.

A bit too long

Very slow at start then fast at the end, seemed to drag in middle. Dante lovers will enjoy