This is a chunker of a book.

Luckily, I got to listen to the audiobook via Netgalley. And what a treat this was.

Absolutely amazing and spot on narration with two narrators, the male voice narrating the story, the female voice offering the explanations as offered in the book as footnotes.

The story is captivating from beginning to end and touching down on so many subjects that we currently are still faced with, racism, language, translation, colonialism, empire, to name but a few.

Personally, I think, everybody should read this book, as R.F. Kuang has written something new and different into the fantasy genre, and has done so superbly.

This was a bit ambitious of me, I will admit that! I have been dipping my toes into dark academia/fantasy and I've never been hugely into historical fiction so why did I attempt this? Who knows! I thought the writing was beautiful and loved the wide cast of characters but sadly it didn't offer much else for me - and that's completely my fault. I will say, if you are usually into dark academia/historical fiction this is for you!

Excellent and different book! Great story telling and brilliant character. I really liked the narrator of this version, it took me a little time to get used to the footnotes being read by a different narrator, but I got eventually used to it. I would highly recommend this audiobook.

Thank you for an advanced copy of this audiobook in exchange for an honest review.

This book really is something special. I’ve seen so many excellent reviews for it that have gone into so much detail and analysis that this book undoubtedly deserves. The amount of research and time that has gone into writing this book honestly blows my mind and is absolutely incredible and I don’t feel my review can do it justice. With that said I really enjoyed this epic tale of language and fantasy and dark academia. This is a long book and may not be to everyone’s tastes as it is quite academic but it is definitely worth it. It covers colonialism, culture and identity in such a throughly provoking way and although based in the 1800s there is certainty much that can be related to our modern day circumstances.
I also really appreciated having the audio version of this book as I feel it really helped to immerse you in the different languages. The narrators were really good and kept me engaged and focused on a long and complicated plot. I also really like the use of a second narrator to read the footnotes, which I often miss when reading physical or ebooks.

Overall this is an epic novel that covers so many different topics. Highly recommend to fans of dark academia and fantasy.

Babel by R.F. Kuang is a gripping story about 4 translation students in Oxford that provides a perfect criticism of British colonialism and academia whilst also intertwining a brilliant magic system all based around the intricacies of language. If you are looking for a dark academia read this one should be the one you pick up.

We follow a Chinese boy on his life journey as he is taken from his home avoiding certain death and is mentored in order to become a part of Oxford's translation school. This is where he meets like-minded academics as well as challenges brought on by discrimination. It isn't until he is approached by a secret society at Babel that he realises just how questionable this organisation might be.

The magic system is based on silver bars, inscribed with "matching pairs" which are relationships between words of different languages that create a desired effect.

Kuang's characters are so well sculpted that the bonds of friendship they develop feel so personal and make the events in the book hit you so much worse (in a good way). Every character felt so well-rounded and well thought out and her villain characters were perfectly written. The plot was interesting, thought-provoking, well-paced and is so well-suited to discuss the horror of the British empire whilst still providing a brilliant fantastical story.

I really enjoyed the audiobook for this read. The narrators were amazing! Not only was it very nice to hear different languages pronounced correctly (which I most definitely would not have gotten right by reading it) but they also were great at immersing me in this setting and giving Kuang's characters brilliant voices and personality. The asides of information provided by a different narrator also helped to not remove me from this immersion and instead creating nice breaks.

Overall, this was a brilliant 4.5 read for me. A very emotional but beautiful story.

(Warnings: This book contains racist language, violence based on discrimination, domestic violence)

With thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an audio arc of this book, all opinions expressed here are my own.

Babel by R.F. Kuang is a very dark academic dense read. I unfortunately found the audiobook tough to follow as the topic was so heavy. Unfortunately this is a case where I really should have read the blurb harder and not just gone off the rave reviews I kept hearing. Not for me, a two star read.

Babel by R.F. Kuang is available now.

What a mind-blowing adventure this was! I am lost for words. This audiobook was a beautiful journey, and I didn't want it to end. It was my first novel by RF Kuang, and I will be exploring more books now! It was like a combination of all my favoruite themes and genres - academia, darkness and magic. The characters deeply resonated with me, and I was sad when it was over.

An epic listen, which had me hanging on each chapter. I've listened to my first two novels by R. F. Kuang in the last few months and been blown away by the audiobooks of both Babel and The Poppy War.

Babel is a fantasy, historical fiction, coming of age novel, thriller and many more genres by turn, as it twists through the evolutions of its story and characters. Kuang has written a novel so adeptly interwoven with the Opium wars, British Empire, Oxford academia, industrial evolution, strikes and women's suffrage that it is so believable as to almost seem a part of history. I loved the sheer brilliance and scope of this.

Babel is ceaselessly engaging. Through the eyes of Robyn Swift, Kuang deeply involves us in the world of colonialism, oppression, identity, belonging, culture, language and so much more, from Canton to Oxford and back again. No one can portray and make me understand the complexities of intersecting and overlapping identities as Kuang can; the dichotomy of both hating and resenting a place or culture, and yet wanting to be accepted by it. She entirely puts you into the mind of her characters. Between Robyn and the awesome three others of his cohort we explore so many perspectives, even before those of the fantastic side characters.

I both loved and hated Kuang's Oxford and Babel, just as her characters did. They both had such a strong sense of place. As a once language student myself, I enthused with the students over language learning, was fascinated with them over the etymology and evolution of words, and loved how magic came from that which is untranslatable. More than that, Babel made me question the ethics of language learning and translation and how this can be used and abused by those in power.

At first, the narrator's choice of Oxford accent seemed jarring amongst the streets of Canton, but I soon came to see the cleverness of this. His range of character voices was superb and the accompanying voiced footnotes essential.

A completely engrossing and thought-provoking novel. Read Babel and thank me later.

I knew I had to get my hands on this ASAP as soon as it was announced. I fell in love with R.F. Kuang’s writing during THE POPPY WAR trilogy and knowing that BABEL was going to be language focused made me incredibly curious. The tagline ‘An act of translation is always an act of betrayal.’ had me absolutely rapt from the first announcement.

Admittedly, when I first picked Babel up, I wasn’t sure if I was going to enjoy it, but I felt completely compelled to pick it up and keep reading every minute of every day. There’s something about R.F. Kuang’s writing that is absolutely impossible to walk away from. I ended up alternating between the physical copy and the audiobook so I could keep reading while I was working. Considering the long timescale of this story, it was incredibly paced. It hit a really good rhythm from the start and I was engaged from the first page to the last. And then I got to the end, and I cried my eyes out which shouldn’t be a surprise because I sobbed my way through THE BURNING GOD but here we are.

Between the fantastic characterisation and the incredibly accurate and well-handled commentary on colonialism and white supremacy, this book emotionally wrecked me in all the best ways. I’ve seen criticism from other white readers that they felt bad reading this, and honestly? Good. If books like this and THE POPPY WAR trilogy make you feel like ‘a bad guy’ as a white reader, then you’ve still got learning to do (and I say this as a white reader who also still has learning to do).

The audiobook performance was spectacular. It was brilliantly performed and the narration added an amazing depth to all of the characters. I really felt for Robin the whole way through the book and though I had an audiobook review copy via Netgalley, I preordered the Babel audiobook too so I could listen again when I want to reread (which I definitely will).

This book is very clever and very convoluted, but despite that I never had difficulty following the plot and it all fell together perfectly. I can’t wait to reread because I just know that I’m gonna see so much more depth that I missed the first time.

I've been hearing about this book all over social media and Goodreads - it's many peoples' favourite of the year, and is so highly anticipated, so I was intrigued to give it a try.

I'm not a huge fantasy fan, but the dark academia / alternative history twist interested me, and this hits more magical realism that all-out fantasy. The magic system is logical, well explained and realistic - I found myself second guessing if it could have been real, it was so well woven into our own history.

I loved writing style, with asides and footnotes like that of an academic text, it really immersed me in the story and setting even more, mimicing the environment the characters themselves were experiencing in Oxford. It is clear that RF Kuang is an academic herself, and I loved the way she could direct us towards events from, and commentary on, our own history while setting the story in this fictionalised universe.

The characters were such a strength of this book - Robin was a delightful and complicated main character to follow. At every step I could understand his decisions and feelings, wether he was making good or bad decisions, and he along with the rest of the cast of characters were so vivid and well realised. She captured the comradery and found-family that many experience at university. Nobody was a cartoon or a caricature, and Kuang did an excellent job of showing us the characters' motivations (whether good or bad, likeable or villainous).

The narrators were both excellent, Chris Lew Kum Hoi in particular was impressive in the number of accents he took on effectively (I can only personally speak for the British regional accents, these were great). I loved the addition of the spoken pronunication for the Chinese and other languages, in order to properly represent these languages, which is important given the story and message of this book, and the author.

My only issues were that some of the plot points seemed a little predictable - there were a few key events that I anticipated from much earlier on in the book. However, this isn't a huge issue, as this isn't the kind of book that relies on cheap twists to shock the reader (in fact, it could be a strength, as it shows how well Kuang has written this plot, that it could have been a part of our own British history).

Overall, this book is deserving of all the love and attention it's getting, and there is a lot to get out of it whatever your personal opinions and previous knowledge on colonialism, translation, academia and British history. Above all, it's refreshing to have read an own voices book that is both historical fiction and in a British academic setting, and this has so much love and hope at the heart of it. I can highly recommend the audiobook format, and I think this is a book that can appeal to a whole range of readers as it crosses over fantasy, historical fiction, literary fiction and science fiction.

'An act of translation is always an act of betrayal' — Babel, R. F. Kuang (2022).

Babel was one of my most anticipated reads of 2022, and it didn't disappoint. R. F. Kuang crafted a superb novel tackling the problematisation of colonialism and racism at its core through the story of four young Babel students: Robin, Ramy, Victoire, and Letty. More accurately, Robin is the one at the heart of this story. The novel opens with Professor Lovell finding him in Canton, China, while cholera spreads. This deadly virus kills his mother and leaves him orphaned. From there, Robin is 'saved'/taken from his country to travel to England, where he accepts the tutelage of his professor and undergoes several linguistic classes to grasp ancient languages and linguistic structures that will allow him access to the famous Royal institute of translation located in Oxford—Babel. This is where he meets some fellow classmates, Rami and Victoire, who underwent the same process as him, and Letty, a white girl with whom all three take affection.

Babel is the dream until it becomes a nightmare that unravels the most terrible things Robin has always blinded himself to. The young translator-to-be is contacted by the secretive Hermès Society, which shows determination to make the institute crumble. From their encounter, Robin realises that in the silver-working bars that the institute teaches them to master lie the power of the British empire and the roots of the racism he suffers from daily. Worst, the very translation skills that give him safety and knowledge turn him into a pawn, used in warfare and malicious scheming.

I have a very strange relationship with this book. First, because it literally took me months to finish, and second because I loved it. Babel is the kind of book that is super difficult to categorise--I'm not even sure that's what Rebecca F. Kuang would like her readers to do. But while I was reading it, I thought about all the Bildungsroman novels I read, old novels attempting to deal with colonialist, binarist, and even misogynist visions of the world while also being flawed with the same issues, and I thought 'wow, this book truly is the most perfect response to these novels.' I think that's also why I enjoyed it so much: people have been speaking about the story as the new best dark academia novel (and I agree with that), but it IS an academic book. It is a fictionalised essay that draws on various sources and essayists who themselves undermine colonialism and racism. So yes, Babel is a book difficult to digest; that's probably why it took me so long to read it. But I believe that's a book WORTH reading. It takes a new perspective on colonialism by finding it in translation and showing how it can become a colonialist tool, worst, a warfare weapon against minoritarian (at this time) countries.

Learning more about the history of translation and about the visions of some famous authors such as Percy Shelley was extremely interesting, too. Honestly, I can barely fathom the enormous endeavour it must have taken Rebecca to gather all the sources into a single cohesive line of plot. It truly is impressive. I have made some annotations during my reading about that!

Babel is definitely a book that I think everybody should read. Its characters are funny and witty, vulnerable in all sorts of ways that make them very human and so relatable. I found little faults, if none, to this novel, and for all the reasons I cited above, I will recommend it to my fellow readers on social media. The audiobook is the cherry on top for every reader who would like to perfect their experience of reading this book. It gives, like many other audiobooks, a new dimension to the novel that I found particularly riveting. Chris's and Billie's voices were very agreeable to listen to and helped me find a good balance with my reading of the novel and its footnotes.

Thank you so much HarperCollins Audio UK for the opportunity to listen to Babel's audiobook and thank Netgalley.

thank you to netgalley for giving me an advanced reader's copy of this audiobook in exchange for an honest review!

honestly...an extra thank you to netgalley because its rebecca and she's one of my favourite authors and i really want to have read everything she's written but...i would NOT have had the motivation to struggle through this book if i didn't have to write a review for it:') even if it did take me three months. and the audiobook was a lifesaver because i could barely read a chapter of my e-copy without wanting to sleep, so...babel. where do i begin.

we may have gotten off the wrong foot with this review, but i have a lot of mixed feelings about this book. it was my most anticipated release of the year, and I had an unshakeable faith that it wouldn't disappoint. rf kuang has said this is the most ambitious, personal thing she's written, and the poppy war trilogy was kind of like her training wheels so she could create a magnum opus in this book. i love love love the poppy war trilogy to death, so the bar was sky-high.

this book is stylistically gorgeous, and you can tell it's a passion project. the discussions on linguistics and translation are super mega well researched, and were so, so interesting. definitely the highlight of the book for me. I know a lot of people found the footnotes annoying, but they were another one of my favourite things about the book. i really enjoyed the snippets of peripherally related information and they really enhanced the book for me.

that said...it is so, so heavy-handed, but in a sense, the lack of nuance was actually kind of refreshing in that it made sure to emphasize there's no grey area when it comes to a lot of these topics. there isn't a silver-lining or anything redeeming about colonialsm, and as the thesis-worthy title of this book suggests, there's no pleading to the humanity of your colonizers. as a kid in elementary school, id always tend to side more with the moderates when i read about our freedom struggle: the extremists were justfied and they weren't WRONG in wanting to resort to violence, but...was it really necessary? weren't the british human too, didn't they have some sense of humanity, did we really have to stoop so low? peace was an unshakeable pillar of morality, and did we really need to kill people for our freedom?

as i reached middle and high school, though, i found myself progressively resonating more and more with the extremist freedom fighters. the moderate philosophy was rooted in taking the moral high ground in appealing, negotiating, begging for basic respect from their colonizers. and the more you live, the more you learn, the angrier you become. there's a lot to the the gandhian ideals of ahimsa and satyagraha, but we didn't get our freedom exclusively because of them. as a kid, or even adults who live in countries that were never colonized, it's easy to write off the extremists, to paint them as the bad guys, to live in an illusion of moral purity, a world where their beliefs were never necessary. but here's the thing: that violence was necessary, and nothing, NOTHING compared to the atrocities and still lasting scars of colonialism. it's easy to be peace-living when the conflict doesn't affect you, when it doesnt stomp over your very existence and everything you have to live for. im not gonna elaborate more on this because i could rant on about this forever, but this is one area where babel does a great job: it's a fantastic anticolonialist thesis on the necessity of violence. especially after reading white people complain about it, i like that this can get just a little bit of what it feels like into their thick skulls, because they - as illustrated by the character of letty - refuse to get it. they likely never will. but this book makes a really, really compelling attempt to get them to try.

but. but but but. this book, at least for me, brought nothing new to the table. it was all basic anti-colonialist rhetoric and - maybe because im indian - things ive heard since i was a kid. and it doesn't really go beyond or explore anything new or revolutionary. the characters are so fucking flat and all feels like carboard vessels sprouting textbooks, making it fall flat as a novel. that would be fine if it worked well as an informative anti-colonialist work, but it really didnt add anything new. ive seen so, so many better works on the lived experiences pertaining to the same thing, this is a little harsh but...reading any basic history textbook would be so much more interesting AND informative. this book feels like a textbook, except it gives you very little. the characters and story drag on, and there really isn't much memorable about it.

the worldbuilding was super creative and i loved what rf kuang did with the magic system built around silverworking and translation, and the characters definitely had their moments. this book broke my heart, because somehow, despite their 2D personalities, I actually grew really attached to some of these characters, and it hurt to lose them. ramy's death still makes me want to cry.

this book has its moments when it pulled at my heart strings or got to me (it handled the whole survivor/existential guilt + diaspora themes really well), but it drags so fucking much and isn't, on the whole, very memorable for me. there are definitely things i liked, but mostly...i just feel like i wasted hours of my time for the most mediocre experience ever. everything was just so predictable. and boring.

the audiobook narrator was solid though!

Babel was fascinating in many ways. Meticulously researched, ingeniously contrived. Was grasped from page one, fascinated with the Oxford Ms Kuang so lovingly built. The magic system served as a love letter to languages and the subtle art of translation, and the novel was a wonder to read... but it wasn't perfect. The take on colonialism was perhaps too one sided ("Brits are bad, everyone else good"), with the second half of the novel absconding the magic and wonders of the world built in exchange of a constant gripe against Britain. I'm not excusing the horrors and abuses of imperialism, but can't believe everyone was evil or selfish as the novel portrays. And it's a shame, because it was such a wonderfully made novel, that could've been better served with a more nuanced take on politics to inspire debate. 4 out of 5. Many thanks to Netgalley for the advanced audiobook.

It was quite slow and dense, sometimes I like this kind of books but this one did not click with me. And I was hoping that I would love it as I heard so many good things about this book. However, I did not like this as it was very character based, and plot wise it was not that gripping. My guess is the world building was too much. I don't know about you but I don't like when there is too much world building, like yeah that's great to know about their background but if it is not necessary for the plot just skip it, or just mention it briefly and carry on. The writing however was good enough to read but it was distracting while listening when non-English words were described with another narrator, it just felt off.

Wow. WOW. What. A. Book!

Safe to say there has been plenty of hype surrounding this book but it more than lives up to it. The story is brilliantly crafted on every level, and completely took me by surprise.

All I knew about this book going in was that it was dark academia, it was about translation, and that it critiqued the euro-centric elements of academia. While all of these things are true, they barely scratch the surface.

The setting is an alternate industrial revolution-era Britain, where silver rather than steam has fuelled the British Empire. Only translators can work silver – I will save the how and why because it’s fascinating and revealed so well – and the more languages you have access to, the more powerful you are.

Enter Robin Swift, an orphan from Canton who is ‘taken in’ by an English professor and primed for an education at Babel, the world’s most prestigious and powerful translation centre. He makes friends, studies hard, and creates a life for himself in Oxford, but soon comes to question the place Babel has in the empire.

It’s a long book (the audiobook was over 20 hours), and the first half is what I would call ‘dark academia shenanigans’ – friendships forged over research, late nights in the library, secret societies, and so on. Not only is this part of the book a good read in its own right, it brilliantly sets up the world, the research, the inner workings of this version of empire for the second half of the book.

There are so many layers to the story: there’s the surface level plot; intricate and shifting friendships; commentary on the way languages and culture are exploited in the name of empire, and on the inaccessibility of education and academia. It’s a long book, yes, but never a dull one, and one that has you on the edge of your seat in the final chapters.

The only drawback I had – and this is a small criticism – is I wish there had been a different, or shorter, author’s note. The book began with an in-depth, slightly defensive explanation of all of the historical and geographical liberties taken. While clearly well-meant, its only effect was the smug feeling I got every time I spotted an inaccuracy that wasn’t specifically addressed.

The narration is fantastic, and its no easy feat for one person to keep me engaged for so long! The footnotes had a different narrator altogether, which made them easily distinguishable and kept the tone of having an aside, rather than making them part of the main text. My only small complaint is there were a couple of mispronunciations (Michaelmas, for example, was read as ‘Michael-muss’ rather than ‘mick-ul-muss’ – I can’t speak to any of the non-English pronunciations) which only bothered me in that it’s a book specifically about language and translation, and the book opened with the previously mentioned author’s note. But if an author’s note and a couple of mispronunciations on the audiobook are my biggest complaints, that speaks volumes to the quality of the book, both the text and the audio performance.

I was hoping I would enjoy this book; I was not expecting it to be one of the best books I’ve read this year, and perhaps one of the best I’ve read ever. Don’t doubt the hype; this is a brilliant book that is destined to become a modern classic.

I received a free copy of the audiobook for review. All opinions are my own.

BABEL is a book of epic proportions, a story of academics going up against and empire and struggling with the sense of desiring and loving something that you also hate and excludes you.

This is a meticulously researched historical fantasy novel, full of details and also linguistical nerdery. I loved the way it took real events and real politics (the silver crisis of the 1800s) and added magic, transforming and magnifying it to be even more deadly and seductive. It's a rich world that uses the history to reflect the many ways things haven't changed in almost 200 years, and the weapons and arguments still used today by the elite and privileged.

It is such a great magic system, the way the dissonance between the nuances of words becomes the power. It's a hard magic system (my favourite type), where everything has clear rules and consequences, so when it goes wrong, it feels earnt and not on a whim.

Also this is a dark academia that actually involves both learning existing knowledge and adding to the body of knowledge? As an academic myself, I always feel a bit meh when a dark academia just uses the academia part as an aesthetic but BABEL doesn't do that at all. It is about knowledge at its heart - the control and exploitation of it.

The writing is also great, hooking and hard to put down (despite it being a big book that's hurting your wrists...) It's a slower written book, which gives it time to conjure the world and explore Robin's confliction over Babel. Plus there's a sense of plodding inevitability of drawing towards the final confrontation (and the ending itself, which I predicted very early on.) The tension is in who will blink first, send the dominoes toppling over.

I started reading this book as an audiobook but DNF'd that. This book has footnotes in and, in the audiobook, they are spoken by another narrator, just butting into the main book, interrupting the flow. It was so jarring and I just felt like I was continually being jerked out of the story.

Even in print from, I did not enjoy the footnotes. Trying to read them kept pulling me out of the story as they interrupted the flow, and they didn't add anything necessary. It was like reading scenes and paragraphs that had ben cut from the main story because they meandered and distracted from the story and emotions of it, or read like an academic's insertions, which created a tone mismatch. I wish I'd given up on them earlier. (My opinion on footnotes in novels is the same as in academic texts - if it's necessary, include it in the main body. If not, don't bother. And this book only reinforced that feeling.)

Wow! Where do I begin?
I’m not going to write a convoluted review (I’ve seen plenty of those), but I will let you know how it made me feel.

I’m not going to lie, I was intimidated by not only the sheer size but the complexity of the story and subject matters that R.F. Kuang delves in. Her exploration into colonialism, racism, sexism and privilege is so evocative it elicits a strong reaction. A reaction that leaves you questioning everything.

Then we wander into this beautifully crafted world. A world so vivid it’s like you are there, watching the lives of its inhabitants, especially the main character Robin Swift and his new friends. Each is deliciously written and wonderfully complex.

Babel is incredibly fascinating. It feels real yet has this intricate magical system woven into its core. It is the most thought-provoking piece of fantasy fiction I’ve ever read!

I have the Illumicrate special edition and never fully understood the sprayed edges until now. And now it’s my favourite quote!

The first half is where we learn about Babel, translation, and linguistics. And we are also introduced to some key characters, which marvellously sets up the second half.
The first part, for some (including me), might feel a little long-winded, but it’s integral to the whole story, so please stick with it. I promise you won’t be disappointed.

The end? I cannot begin to comment on it, but it was breathtaking.

Thank you, Harper Collins & NetGalley, for the audiobook in return for my honest review.

This book was phenomenal. Despite its 22hrs of audio, it kept me engaged throughout. It’s written in a classic R.F Kuang style, known so well from The Poppy War trilogy, and centres around Robin Swift, a Chinese boy who is taken to England to study at Oxford’s prestigious translation centre - Babel. I cannot even begin to describe in words how absolutely incredible and clever the plot was. The characters were all flawed in many ways, the plot line thickened so many times and every time I tried to figure out what came next, I was surprised by the outcome. An absolute corker of a book.

Okay, I’m so conflicted on my thoughts of this book!! Although I really appreciated how much research went into this and I loved the writing style, I just found it so drawn out and long! On the whole, I sadly didn’t find it an enjoyable read as it took so much concentration and I felt like I was reading a text book at times. With that being said, I would recommend it to anyone who loves Dark Academia because to me this was quintessentially that genre and there were some really good sections within it, I just feel it could have been shorter!

I definitely feel listening to the audiobook made me enjoy this book more and it enabled me to get through the book a lot quicker!

The narration of this book makes it easy to listen to. The voice is soft and makes the dense text easy to ingest, I could find myself getting lost in this, especially in the last chapter is vrought the emotions of the text to life.

There was so much to love about this book, but I think the winning factor was that near the end I asked myself "At what point did this go too far?". The lines became so blurred between agreeing with Robin and being scared of what he'll do next.

I will now be spending the next few hours staring at the ceiling and wondering what to do next.