Babel
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4.5 • 29 Ratings
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- $39.99
Publisher Description
THE #2 SUNDAY TIMES AND #1 NYT BESTSELLER
‘One for Philip Pullman fans’
THE TIMES
‘This one is an automatic buy’
GLAMOUR
‘Ambitious, sweeping and epic’
EVENING STANDARD
‘Razor-sharp’
DAILY MAIL
‘An ingenious fantasy about empire’
GUARDIAN
'Literary super-stardom doesn't seem too far out of her reach now'
THE HERALD
Traduttore, traditore: An act of translation is always an act of betrayal.
Oxford, 1836.
The city of dreaming spires.
It is the centre of all knowledge and progress in the world.
And at its centre is Babel, the Royal Institute of Translation. The tower from which all the power of the Empire flows.
Orphaned in Canton and brought to England by a mysterious guardian, Babel seemed like paradise to Robin Swift.
Until it became a prison…
But can a student stand against an empire?
An incendiary new novel from award-winning author R.F. Kuang about the power of language, the violence of colonialism, and the sacrifices of resistance.
'A masterpiece that resonates with power and knowledge. BABEL is a stark picture of the cruelty of empire, a distillation of dark academia, and a riveting blend of fantasy and historical fiction – a monumental achievement’
Samantha Shannon, author of THE PRIORY OF THE ORANGE TREE
Delve into the heart of an alternative UK, where Babel reigns as a top entry among gaslamp fantasy books. It's a great, bestselling read, peppered with the essence of urban exploration and thrilling action, an adventure that will leave you breathless and wanting more. For fans of Rebecca Yarros (Iron Flame), Leigh Bardungo (Six of Crows), Brandon Sanderson (The Way of Kings) and Olivie Blake (The Atlas Six) and Samantha Shannon (The Priory of the Orange Tree).
About the author
Rebecca F. Kuang is a Marshall Scholar, Chinese-English translator, and the Astounding Award-winning and the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy Award nominated author of the Poppy War trilogy and the forthcoming Babel. Her work has won the Crawford Award and the Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel. 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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Woven into Babel, a thrilling work of fantasy, is an astute dissection of the nature of exploitation. The resulting book is both entertaining and thought-provoking, with relevance for the present day despite its 19th-century setting. Much of the action takes place in Oxford, in the lead-up to the First Opium War. Robin Swift is taken from his home in China after the death of his mother, raised in England by a cold guardian, and then sent to a prestigious Oxford translators’ institute whose magical silver-work facilitates much of modern life—and for which he has been groomed apparently since birth. Here, he is forced to reckon with what this work, in the service of the Empire, really means for the rest of the world. He must decide, too, what lengths he will go to in order to fight the violence of the current world order. Will he embrace violence himself? It’s a dramatic story of shifting allegiances, of twists and betrayals, and of a search for the right thing to do, however unpleasant it may be.
