Katabasis

Name: Katabasis
Rating: 4.2 (1423 reviews)

by Neal Stephenson Book 4 in the The Mongoliad Cycle series.

First published 2013

Amazon

4.2(1,423)

Ögedei Khan’s death has halted the Mongol invasion of the West, but the surviving Shield-Brethren remain deep inside a devastated empire. Exhausted by battle and divided by betrayal, they begin the long return across a frozen landscape in which former allies, displaced communities and Mongol factions are all trying to understand the succession crisis.

The company’s mission may have saved Europe, yet survival does not resolve whether its members acted as heroes, murderers or instruments of a larger struggle. Their homeward journey becomes a reckoning with the destruction they witnessed and with the possibility that the lives to which they hope to return no longer exist.