Katabasis (Deluxe Limited Edition) (Pre-order August 26, 2025)

Katabasis by R.F. Kuang (Pre-order August 26, 2025) 

🔥📚 PRE-ORDER BONUS: Receive the stunning DELUXE LIMITED EDITION—first printing only, while supplies last! This collectible hardcover includes stenciled edges, foil case effects, and illustrated endpapers.

Dante’s Inferno meets Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi in R. F. Kuang’s all-new dark academia fantasy—where two rival scholars must descend into Hell itself to rescue their professor’s soul…at the risk of losing their own.

Katabasis (n.): Ancient Greek—a hero’s descent to the underworld.

Alice Law has sacrificed everything for her academic ambitions—her health, her pride, her personal life—to work under the greatest magician in the world, Professor Jacob Grimes. Then, in a single instant, he’s gone—dead in a magical accident that might just be her fault.

Grimes is in Hell. Alice is going after him. And so is her academic nemesis, Peter Murdoch.

Armed only with chalk, ancient myths, and the burning need to justify years of academic torment, Alice and Peter must navigate a treacherous, ever-shifting underworld where magick can’t always save you—and where the greatest danger may be the secrets they keep from each other.

Perfect for fans of scholarly rivalries, morally gray magic, and underworld quests, this is a haunting, atmospheric journey into obsession, ambition, and the price of knowledge.