2025's INSTANT No.1 SUNDAY TIMES best-seller from the author of YELLOWFACE

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

One of the BBC's 25 best books of 2025

'Katabasis is a formidable, timeless work, destined to be a modern classic' OLIVIE BLAKE 'Katabasis is more than a novel to savor. This book is an experience. I envy those who get to read it for the first time' REBECCA ROSS 'A witty, gory, harrowing ride' LEIGH BARDUGO 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 novel by Sunday Times Number One Bestseller R.F. Kuang. Coming August 2025.

Autorentext

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.

Klappentext

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

One of the BBC's 25 best books of 2025

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