Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution by R. F. Kuang
The city of dreaming spires.
It is the centre of all knowledge and progress in the world.
And at its …
I loved this (I read his later book The Stolen Bicycle first, which made me pick up this one).
It might be one of the saddest, most miserable, and yet most beautiful books I've read. A mixture of magical realism, environmental concerns, and Taiwanese indigenous culture, it was written over 10 years ago, and the environmental issues it predicts have only gotten worse and more hopeless since. In the end it's down to a small black and white rescue cat to give the main protagonist a reason to keep living, which seems apt.
