How far would you go to get a degree? When Alice Law and her academic rival, Peter Murdoch, graduate students in Magic at Cambridge University, find their advisor, Professor Jacob Grimes, dead, they barely hesitate before researching how to work their way to hell to find him. After all, they still need him to write their recommendations.

“Katabasis,” by R.F. Kuang, is a deep and hilarious dive into the self-important world of academia. Her previous novel, “Babel,” also took place within a magical college, but this book goes far deeper, as our protagonists study Dante, Orpheus and every other previous visitor to the underworld, catalyzing their discoveries into a journey through a hell they find simultaneously inscrutable and all too familiar.

Hell is an impossible space, composed of too

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