Katabasis: A Novel

· HarperCollins
4.0
11 reviews
Ebook
560
Pages
Eligible
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About this ebook

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.

Ratings and reviews

4.0
11 reviews
Sarah Lemler
October 2, 2025
This book is a little hard to review because it had so many things going on at once. It is an academic fantasy in which mythology and classical literature are presented as fact. Magic exists and is manifested through the understanding and use of logic and understanding of mythology and literature. The main characters, Alice and Peter, must journey through Hell in an attempt to find their dead Professor, but on their journey, they end up learning a lot about themselves and each other including Alice's journey in accepting and coping with her own trauma. I really enjoyed the unique way in which Kuang chose to present this story, using understanding of science, mathematics, literature, mythology, and philosophy to make the characters world see so immersive.
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Mad Nodder and Nuts
August 28, 2025
R. F. Kuang’s "Katabasis" is a revelation: a philosophical fantasy plunging into trauma, connection, and academic critique. Alice Law descends into a paradoxical underworld, uncovering hard truths about loyalty and self. Forged in rivalry, her bond with Peter Murdoch strengthens. The book's core: meaning, forgiveness, and freedom come from accepting imperfection. A five-star journey, challenging yet hopeful.
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Mariam Omar
August 30, 2025
. Too expensive
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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, and Yellowface. Her work has won the Nebula, Locus, Crawford, and British Book Awards. A Marshall Scholar, 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 studies diaspora, contemporary Sinophone literature, and Asian American literature.

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