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[[image:Bancroft_Senlin2.jpg|link=https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0356510816?ie=UTF8&tag=thebookbag-21&linkCode=as2&camp=1634&creative=6738&creativeASIN=0356510816]] Thomas Senlin embarks on his honeymoon with high hopes. He and his young wife Marya are travelling on a sleeper train across Ur to that engineering marvel, that fabled centre of culture, the Tower of Babel. It's a place he's read books about, taught his pupils about, and longed to visit, but the bustling and chaotic surroundings of the Tower in the desert are a long way from the quiet fishing village in which Senlin teaches. When he loses sight of Marya shortly after their arrival, he has no option but to look for her in this strange and overwhelming place. For all his background reading before the trip, he is ill-prepared for what he finds in the Tower, both its marvels and its horrors, and thus begins Thomas Senlin's arduous quest to recover his wife.
Senlin Ascends is Josiah Bancroft's first novel and what a spectacular debut it is, though it should be noted that this isn't strictly new but a traditionally published edition of a book he self-published in 2013. The mysteries of the Tower itself haunt the novel, and its baffling systems and arbitrary justice are as chilling as anything Kafka wrote. At the same time the invention of the setting, the details in each of the strikingly different levels of the Tower, are incredible and mean that each location has its own atmosphere, whether basic or opulent, oil-lit or electrified. Nothing is quite as it seems and there are some dark surprises for the unwary tourist who doesn't know who or what to trust.
