Katabasis by R. F. Kuang

Katabasis is a 2025 novel by R.F. Kuang about two rival Cambridge postgraduate students, Alice Law and Peter Murdoch, who descend into Hell to retrieve the soul of their deceased mentor, Professor Jacob Grimes. Driven by guilt and the fear of their academic futures collapsing without Grimes’s recommendation letter, they embark on a perilous journey through a Hell that resembles a campus. The novel blends academic satire with a mythic underworld journey to explore themes of ambition, institutional critique, and the nature of truth.