Second paragraph of chapter three:

“Been here for ages—”

‘Katabasis’ means descent to the underworld, and here Alice Law, a Cambridge postgraduate student of magick, enters Hell with her classmate to try and rescue their tutor, who has died in a magical experiment gone wrong. It began rather well, as a carefully constructed fantasy afterworld leaning on Virgil and especially Dante, with a stark sparsely described landscape inhabited by the souls of the dead. Symbolic logic turns out to be key to dealing with both magick and the afterlife.

But the metaphor of Hell being a graduate studies programme is laid on very thick, and there is a section about two thirds of the way through the (very long) book where I began to feel that I couldn’t take it quite as seriously as may have been intended. Also the plot really narrows down quite quickly to the point where only one ending is possible, and it duly gets there.

So I don’t think I’ll be nominating it for the Hugos, though I’m pretty sure it will get on the ballot anyway and, depending on what else is there, it will have a decent shot at winning, as Babel should have done in 2023. You can get Katabasis here.