Katabasis

Alice Law and Peter Murdoch are rival magick PhD students at Cambridge who have hated each other for three years of fighting for the same advisor's attention, the same fellowship money, and the same shot at a tenure-track career. When their advisor Professor Grimes dies in his office mid-experiment, both students descend into the underworld to retrieve his soul, and the recommendation letter neither of them can graduate without. Kuang builds the magick system on philosophical paradox, the underworld on a Dante-inflected geography, and the rivalry between Alice and Peter on the kind of academic resentment only PhD programs produce.