Skip to content
Cover for "Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution"

Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane...

$41.81 Save $16.18!

List Price: $57.99

Almost Gone, Only 1 Left!

Book Overview

From award-winning author R. F. Kuang comes Babel, a thematic response to The Secret History and a tonal retort to Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell that grapples with student revolutions, colonial resistance, and the use of language and translation as the dominating tool of the British empire. Traduttore, traditore: An act of translation is always an act of betrayal.1828. Robin Swift, orphaned by cholera in Canton, is brought to London by the mysterious...

Customer Reviews

1 rating

Fantasy but with a purposeful message/history

Kind of reminds me of Animal Farm, but so much more. It is a fantasy plot, but with obvious parallels to real history. For someone like me who doesn't know the history much, I will be rereading it as I learn more about the history of the time period it takes place. It builds upon this history and the perspective of minorities, especially those of colonized people, to argue that an oppressor can only be faced through some violence. While the message seems a bit pessimistic, I found the characters to be rather balanced and potentially accurate, but fitting for the argument. It's a book that can just be enjoyed as a fantasy novel or that can be looked at deeper to see if you agree with author or not and can discuss this with other readers. It also has more than one message/argument to think about, so even if you don't like the overarching argument, you can still think about the smaller ones more relevant to colonialism rather than protesting.

Babel or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revoluti Mentions in Our Blog

The 2023 Book Awards Roundup
Published by Ashly Moore Sheldon

As 2023 draws to a close, we thought it would be a good time to review some of this year's celebrated books. Here is a selection of the winners of literature's most distinguished awards and honors.

Our 10 Favorites from Book Riot's Best Books of 2022
Published by Ashly Moore Sheldon

Our friends at Book Riot have published their list of the best books of the year and it includes some great reads, a few of which made our list as well! Here, we highlight ten of our favorites.