Katabasis

Name: Katabasis
Rating: 4.199999809265137 (5 reviews)

R.F. Kuang

Aug 2025 · HarperCollins UK

4.2

5 reviews

Ebook

560

Pages

Eligible

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About this ebook

Prepare for one hell of a journey...

'A big, bold fantasy romp' GUARDIAN

'R.F. Kuang is making magic' ELLE

'[A] truly original and spellbinding hero's-journey story' VOGUE

'I devoured it' RED

Katabasis, noun, Ancient Greek. The story of a hero's descent to the underworld.

Grad student Alice Law has only ever had one goal: to become the brightest mind in the field of analytic magick.

But the only person who can make her dream come true is dead and – inconveniently – in Hell. And Alice, along with her biggest rival Peter Murdoch, is going after him.

But Hell is not as the philosophers claim, its rules are upside-down, and if she’s going to get out of there alive, she and Peter will have to work together.

That’s if they can agree on anything.

Will they triumph, or kill each other trying?

2025’s most unexpected love story is going to be hell in the new No.1 Sunday Times bestselling novel by R.F. Kuang.

'Literary super-stardom doesn't seem too far out of her reach' THE HERALD

‘Mind-bending fantasy’ GRAZIA

Ratings and reviews

4.2

5 reviews

Kay Walker

October 15, 2025

Ultimately unsatisfying even though the denouement was well done. Brilliant passages that went on for pages at times did not compensate for a lot of boring bits where the story lost continuity and merely described aspects of the writer's Hell. The author should have first read Sophie's World about a very young girl being shown how philosophy works. A lot of the text seems the writer's own reflections on being very clever but feeling unable to give back to the world something of real worth. It's very hard being clever as you'll never convey the true feelings it gives you so that less clever people will properly understand. Some language problems popped up at times like neologisms that didn't work and nouns used as verbs etc. Proofreaders must have not been doing their job!

Brian Premchand

September 18, 2025

I know this book has really niche themes, but as a Tab who did a PhD and now has a PhD student, I can really relate to this story. 5/5.

Fran King

September 9, 2025

love this author so much

About the author

R.F Kuang is the author of The Poppy War Trilogy, Babel: An Arcane History, and Yellowface. Her work has won the Nebula, Locus, and British Book Awards. She is pursuing a PhD in East Asian Language and Literature at Yale.

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