Hell is a campus. Or at least, the lower circles are, as Cambridge student Alice Law discovers when she makes the decision to journey into the underworld to retrieve the soul of her academic adviser after an unfortunate accident, and finds it a mirror of the world she descended from. Acclaimed fantasy author R.F. Kuang's Katabasis interrogates themes of loss, grief, and human nature in her refracted version of Cambridge University where Analytical Magick is a field that allows those able to master mathematics, logic, linguistics, and philosophy to bend the rules of reality.
Alice Law's dream has been to dominate that field; the only person who could stand in her way is Peter Murdoch, her adviser's other graduate student. They have been pitted against each other from the beginning as the two potentially brightest students of their cohort, so when he tags along at the last moment as she prepares for her descent into Hell, she does not know what to think. But while they both are at the top of their class and exceptionally well trained, nothing could have prepared them for the reality of the shifting landscape where they now are reliant on each other to survive.
Kuang (Yellowface; Babel) depicts a hellscape that is dark, gory, and brutal, but more ruthless is the mirror she holds up to institutional norms and structures that will feel all too familiar to those in the know. With enthralling prose that makes it impossible to put down, Katabasis is a timeless fantasy that explores what it might mean to travel through death to discover the meaning of life. --Michelle Anya Anjirbag, freelance reviewer