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Josiah Bancroft self-published Senlin Ascends in 2013. It sold modestly, found a small readership through word of mouth, and caught the attention of one particular reader who happened to mention it on social media. That reader was Mark Lawrence. Lawrence’s recommendation sent it viral within fantasy circles, Orbit Books picked it up, and it became one of the most celebrated fantasy novels of the decade.
None of this is surprising once you’ve read it. What is surprising is that it took this long for the world to notice.
What’s It About?
Thomas Senlin is a mild-mannered schoolteacher on his honeymoon. He and his new wife Marya travel to the Tower of Babel — a vast, mysterious structure of unknown height, crammed with a different society on each floor — as tourists. In the crowd, Marya disappears.
The novel is Senlin’s increasingly desperate, increasingly transformed journey through the Tower’s lower ringdoms, searching for his wife while the Tower works on him in ways he didn’t anticipate and wouldn’t have consented to.
It sounds melancholy, and it is. It’s also funny, strange, and written with a precision and beauty that puts it in rare company.
The Tower
The Tower of Babel is one of the great fantasy settings of recent years. Each ringdom — each floor or group of floors — has its own economy, culture, rulers, and horrors. The Parlour, the Baths, the Basement — Bancroft builds them with the loving detail of someone who has been living in this world for a long time, and each has its own distinctive texture.
The Tower is unknowable in its full extent. Nobody seems to have reached the top. The builders are a mystery. The whole structure operates on its own internal logic that the reader pieces together alongside Senlin, and the pleasure of discovery is sustained across all four books.
Senlin Himself
The most remarkable thing about this novel might be what Bancroft does with his protagonist. Senlin begins as a precise, bookish, slightly pompous man who has read about the Tower extensively and confidently knows what to expect. He is wrong about almost everything.
His transformation across the series — forced by circumstances into roles he never imagined, developing capabilities he didn’t know he had — is one of the best character arcs in contemporary fantasy. He never loses his fundamental self, but what surrounds that self changes completely. By the end of the series, the man who steps off the Tower’s last stair is recognisably the same person who entered at the bottom, and entirely different.
The Prose
Bancroft writes beautifully. This is not a secondary quality — it’s central to what makes the series extraordinary. The observation is precise. The metaphors are original. The Tower is described with a vividness that makes it feel genuinely present, and Senlin’s interior life is rendered with a care that makes the emotional beats land with full force.
If you’re the kind of reader who underlines sentences, this is the kind of book you’ll ruin with underlining.
The Series
The Books of Babel runs to four novels: Senlin Ascends, Arm of the Sphinx, The Hod King, and The Fall of Babel. All four are published. The series is complete. The ending is genuinely satisfying.
Start here. Do not read ahead. The less you know going in, the better.
Rating: 5/5
Rated 4.4 Stars on Amazon. Buy Senlin Ascends here.
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