September Book Club: Katabasis by R.F. Kuang

Note: Preorder Katabasis on our website now to get it shipped on its release date, August 26th!

About Yellow Peril Books' Book Club

We're so excited to welcome you to our ongoing community book club hosted around Brooklyn! Each month, we host an in person book club at a local AAPI owned business in Brooklyn. We started this book club with a few goals in mind

• Spotlight some of our favorite AAPI owned businesses, and ensure ticket revenues are invested in supporting these amazing gems. For most events, all ticket proceeds go towards the hosting business. If you'd like to donate to YPB to support our programming efforts, please donate here. 

• Feature different Asian and Asian American authors and their works

• Bring our community together in person to facilitate deeper conversation and connection

Book Club Rules

• You commit to treating everyone with respect and care

• Stay home if you feel sick!

• You do NOT need to have read or finished the book, but you do have to be ready for spoilers! We'll be discussing the themes of the book and you can still participate :)

If you would like to attend but the ticket cost is prohibitive, please reach out to contact@yellowperilbooks.com and we will try to find a solution! We never want lack of funds to be a barrier to entry.

About Katabasis by R.F. Kuang

Dante’s Inferno meets Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi in this all-new dark academia fantasy from R. F. Kuang, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Babel and Yellowface, in which two graduate students must put aside their rivalry and journey to Hell to save their professor’s soul—perhaps at the cost of their own. 

Katabasis, noun, Ancient Greek:

The story of a hero’s descent to the underworld

Alice Law has only ever had one goal: to become one of the brightest minds in the field of Magick. She has sacrificed everything to make that a reality: her pride, her health, her love life, and most definitely her sanity. All to work with Professor Jacob Grimes at Cambridge, the greatest magician in the world.

That is, until he dies in a magical accident that could possibly be her fault.

Grimes is now in Hell, and she’s going in after him. Because his recommendation could hold her very future in his now incorporeal hands and even death is not going to stop the pursuit of her dreams….

Nor will the fact that her rival, Peter Murdoch, has come to the very same conclusion.

With nothing but the tales of Orpheus and Dante to guide them, enough chalk to draw the Pentagrams necessary for their spells, and the burning desire to make all the academic trauma mean anything, they set off across Hell to save a man they don’t even like.

But Hell is not like the storybooks say, Magick isn’t always the answer, and there’s something in Alice and Peter’s past that could forge them into the perfect allies…or lead to their doom.