The next book to be featured this season on the Sara Cox Radio 2 Book Club is Katabasis by R. F. Kuang—a sublimely dark and unputdownable tale of two rival Cambridge academics who must join forces on a rescue mission in hell itself.
The book was released on 26 August and Rebecca’s interview with Sara is on BBC Sounds from Tuesday 26 August.
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We also have an exclusive extract.
Katabasis
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?
About the author
A trailblazing talent on the literary scene, Rebecca is the #1 Sunday Times bestselling author of Babel and global phenomenon Yellowface. She is two-time winner of Fiction Book of the Year at the British Book Awards and has been awarded Blackwell’s Book of the Year, Foyles Fiction Book of the Year, Amazon Book of the Year and twice shortlisted for Waterstones Book of the Year, all accomplished at under 30 years of age.
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.
Get involved
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