Rebecca F. Kuang

What if returning to your cultural roots only makes you feel more like a stranger? When college student Lily Chen travels to Taipei for an intensive Chinese-language programme, she hopes to reconnect with the heritage she has never fully understood. Instead, awkward encounters, complicated relationships, and the sudden death of her grandfather leave her questioning everything she thought she knew about her family and herself. As Lily struggles with language, grief, and the silences surrounding her family’s past, she begins to realise that belonging cannot simply be inherited. Set against the vibrant backdrop of Taipei, this intimate coming-of-age novel explores the distance between cultural identity and lived experience—and the difficult search for a place to call home.

What if the only way to save your future was to journey into Hell? Alice Law has sacrificed almost everything to become a brilliant scholar of analytic magic at Cambridge University. But when her formidable academic advisor, Professor Jacob Grimes, dies in a magical accident, Alice faces the possibility of losing the career she has worked so hard to build. Determined to retrieve his soul, she descends into the underworld, accompanied by Peter Murdoch, her gifted—and deeply resented—academic rival. Guided by ancient myths and philosophical texts, the pair must navigate a Hell that defies everything they have been taught. As their dangerous journey exposes buried secrets and forces them to confront their complicated relationship with their mentor, Alice begins questioning the ambitions that have defined her life. Blending dark academia, mythology, intellectual rivalry, and biting humour, R. F. Kuang’s fantasy explores the brutal demands of academic ambition and the price of pursuing greatness.

How far would you go to become the writer you believe you deserve to be? June Hayward has spent years watching her university friend Athena Liu enjoy the literary success she desperately craves. When Athena dies unexpectedly, June steals her unpublished manuscript, makes a few changes, and publishes it under the ambiguous name Juniper Song. The novel becomes a sensation, bringing June fame, fortune, and the recognition she has always wanted. But as questions about authorship and cultural appropriation begin to surface, maintaining her carefully constructed identity becomes increasingly dangerous. With biting humour and escalating suspense, Yellowface exposes the darker side of the publishing industry, exploring racism, jealousy, literary ambition, and the ethics of telling stories that are not yours.

What if translation were the most powerful weapon in the world? In 1830s Oxford, Robin Swift, an orphan from Canton, is brought to England to study languages at the prestigious Royal Institute of Translation, known as Babel. There, silver-working transforms the subtle differences between languages into extraordinary magical power, helping the British Empire expand its influence across the globe. But as Robin and his fellow students uncover the violence and exploitation sustaining this system, they face an impossible choice: serve the institution that gave them a future or destroy the machinery of imperial power. Blending dark academia, historical fantasy, and political intrigue, Babel examines the relationship between language and power, asking what is lost when cultures are translated, exploited, and controlled by those who rule.

An orphan from a poor southern province. An elite military academy. A power that could destroy an empire. When Rin unexpectedly earns a place at Sinegard, the Nikara Empire’s most prestigious military academy, she believes she has finally escaped a future of poverty and forced marriage. But prejudice, relentless training, and the discovery of her extraordinary shamanic abilities soon push her into a world far more dangerous than she imagined. As war threatens to engulf the empire, Rin discovers that the gods are real—and that the power they offer comes at a terrible price. Inspired by twentieth-century Chinese history, particularly the Second Sino-Japanese War, this dark and uncompromising fantasy explores the brutal realities of warfare, the seduction of vengeance, and the devastating consequences of power. Rin must decide what she is willing to sacrifice to protect her people—and what remains of her humanity when survival demands unimaginable choices.