Robin Swift is an orphan plucked from cholera-stricken Canton in the 1830s and raised in England by a cold guardian, Professor Lovell, to take up a place at Oxford's Royal Institute of Translation, the tower known as Babel. There the empire's power runs on silver bars engraved with paired words from different languages, drawing magic from whatever meaning is lost between them, and Robin's fluency in Mandarin makes him precious. Alongside fellow outsiders Ramy, Victoire and the admiral's daughter Letty, he savours belonging even as he grasps that his gift is fuel for British domination, a tension sharpened when his half-brother Griffin recruits him into the shadowy Hermes Society. Kuang, subtitling the book an argument for the necessity of violence, writes an unashamedly polemical campus novel, footnotes and all, that indicts the university as an instrument of colonial extraction. As the First Opium War draws near, it becomes a story about the point at which complicity turns unbearable, and quiet study gives way to revolt.
