BVBook Verdict
Essential Read

Babel

by R. F. Kuang · 2022

Literary Fiction · ranked #225 in category

Winner · The Nebula Award for Best Novel, 2023

Robin Swift, taken from Canton to Oxford to study at the Royal Institute of Translation — Babel — discovers that the British Empire's power runs on magical silver activated by translation, and that his education is inseparable from the empire's exploitation of the languages and people it has colonised. Kuang's novel is a dark academia fantasy that is also a sustained argument about language, colonialism and the violence embedded in empire.

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The verdict

Category
Literary Fiction
First published
2022 · 2020s
Author
R. F. Kuang
Standing
Essential Read

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