Dark Academia

These twisty novels delve into the dangers of intellectual curiosity, whether from competition, conspiracy, or something else unexpected.

Showing 1 - 20 of 44  There are a total of 208 valid entries on the list.
Book cover for "Where sleeping girls lie"
Star rating for Where sleeping girls lie
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"A girl new to boarding school discovers dark secrets and coverups after her roommate disappears."--
Book cover for "Hell bent"
Star rating for Hell bent
Series:
Alex Stern volume 2.
Average Rating:
4.2 stars
Description:
"Alex Stern returns in New York Times bestselling author Leigh Bardugo's Hell Bent, another tale of murder and dark magic set among the Ivy League elite. Galaxy "Alex" Stern is determined to break Darlington out of hell--even if it costs her a future at Lethe and at Yale. But Alex is playing with forces far beyond her control, and when faculty members begin to die off, she knows these aren't just accidents. Something deadly is at work in New Haven,...
Book cover for "Ninth house"
Star rating for Ninth house
Series:
Alex Stern volume 1.
Average Rating:
4.1 stars
Description:
"Galaxy "Alex" Stern is the most unlikely member of Yale's freshman class. Raised in the Los Angeles hinterlands by a hippie mom, Alex dropped out of school early and into a world of shady drug-dealer boyfriends, dead-end jobs, and much, much worse. In fact, by age twenty, she is the sole survivor of a horrific, unsolved multiple homicide. Some might say she's thrown her life away. But at her hospital bed, Alex is offered a second chance: to attend...
Book cover for "Book of night"
Star rating for Book of night
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Series:
Average Rating:
2.9 stars
Description:
"Charlie Hall has never found a lock she couldn't pick, a book she couldn't steal, or a bad decision she wouldn't make. She's spent half her life working for gloamists, magicians who manipulate shadows to peer into locked rooms, strangle people in their beds, or worse. Gloamists guard their secrets greedily, creating an underground economy of grimoires. And to rob their fellow magicians, they need Charlie. Now, she's trying to distance herself from...
Book cover for "Society of lies"
Star rating for Society of lies
Average Rating:
3.5 stars
Description:
"When a young woman turns up dead on her college campus, her sister doesn't believe it was an accident-and when she starts to dig for answers, her investigations take her closer to home than she ever would have imagined in this thrilling debut novel from an exciting new talent Every year, Maya loves heading back to Princeton for her reunions--she may have graduated a decade ago, but it's always fun to see old faces and take a walk through her own...
Book cover for "The rule of four"
Star rating for The rule of four
Average Rating:
3.2 stars
Description:
Princeton. Good Friday, 1999. On the eve of graduation, two friends are a hairsbreadth from solving the mysteries of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a Renaissance text that has baffled scholars for centuries. Famous for its hypnotic power over those who study it, the five-hundred-year-old Hypnerotomachia may finally reveal its secrets--to Tom Sullivan, whose father was obsessed with the book, and Paul Harris, whose future depends on it. As the deadline...
Book cover for "The city of brass"
Star rating for The city of brass
Series:
Average Rating:
4.5 stars
Description:
A "historical fantasy in which a young con artist in eighteenth century Cairo discovers she's the last descendant of a powerful family of djinn healers. With the help of an outcast immortal warrior and a rebellious prince, she must claim her magical birthright in order to prevent a war that threatens to destroy the entire djinn kingdom"--
Book cover for "Trust exercise"
Star rating for Trust exercise
Average Rating:
2.2 stars
Description:
"In an American suburb in the early 1980s, students at a highly competitive performing arts high school struggle and thrive in a rarified bubble, ambitiously pursuing music, movement, Shakespeare, and, particularly, their acting classes. When within this striving 'Brotherhood of the Arts,' two freshmen, David and Sarah, fall headlong into love, their passion does not go unnoticed--or untoyed with--by anyone, especially not by their charismatic acting...
Book cover for "Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell"
Star rating for Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
Average Rating:
4.1 stars
Description:
Epic tale of nineteenth-century England and the two very different magicians who, as teacher and pupil and then as rivals, emerge to change its history.
Book cover for "Piranesi"
Star rating for Piranesi
Average Rating:
4.2 stars
Description:
"From the ... author of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, an intoxicating, hypnotic new novel set in a dreamlike alternative reality. Piranesi's house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned; waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant. But Piranesi...
Book cover for "Legendborn"
Star rating for Legendborn
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Series:
Legendborn volume 1.
Average Rating:
4.4 stars
Description:
"To discover the truth behind her mother's mysterious death, a teen girl infiltrates a magical secret society claiming to be the descendants of King Arthur and his knights."--
Book cover for "The Temple House vanishing"
Star rating for The Temple House vanishing
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"The disappearance of a brilliant scholarship student and a young, charismatic teacher from an all-girls Catholic boarding school in Ireland is an unsolved mystery that has captivated the whole country. Year after year the media revisit it, and the conspiracy theories persist. Now, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the disappearances, a journalist who grew up on the same street as the missing girl delves into the past to write a series of articles...
Book cover for "The woman in the library"
Star rating for The woman in the library
Average Rating:
3.1 stars
Description:
"The beautifully ornate reading room at the Boston Public Library is completely silent one weekday morning, until a woman's terrified scream echoes through the room. Security guards immediately appear and instruct everyone inside to stay put until they determine there is no threat. While they wait for the all-clear, four strangers who had been sitting in the reading room get to chatting and quickly become friendly. Harriet, Marigold, Whit, and Caine...
Book cover for "The stranger diaries"
Star rating for The stranger diaries
Series:
Average Rating:
4.2 stars
Description:
"Clare Cassidy is no stranger to murder. A high school English teacher specializing in the Gothic writer R.M. Holland, she teaches a course on it every year. But when one of Clare's colleagues and closest friends is found dead, with a line from R.M. Holland's most famous story, 'The stranger,' left by her body. Clare is horrified to see her life collide with the storylines of her favorite literature. To make matters worse, the police suspect the killer...
Book cover for "The magicians"
Star rating for The magicians
Average Rating:
3.5 stars
Description:
Haboring secret preoccupations with a magical land he read about in a childhood fantasy series, Quentin Coldwater is unexpectedly admitted into an exclusive college of magic and rigorously educated in modern sorcery.
Book cover for "A discovery of witches"
Star rating for A discovery of witches
Series:
Average Rating:
4.2 stars
Description:
Book one of the New York Times bestselling All Souls series, from the author of The Black Bird Oracle.
Look for the hit series “A Discovery of Witches,” now streaming on Netflix
“A wonderfully imaginative grown-up fantasy with all the magic of Harry Potter and Twilight” (People).

Deborah Harkness’s sparkling debut, A Discovery of Witches, has brought her...
Book cover for "The Cloisters"
Star rating for The Cloisters
Average Rating:
3.7 stars
Description:
"When Ann Stilwell arrives in New York City, she expects to spend her summer working as a curatorial associate at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Instead she finds herself assigned to The Cloisters, a gothic museum and garden renowned for its medieval art collection and its group of enigmatic researchers studying the history of divination. Desperate to escape her painful past, Ann is happy to indulge the researchers' more outlandish theories about...
Book cover for "An anonymous girl"
Star rating for An anonymous girl
Average Rating:
3.8 stars
Description:
"When Jessica Farris signs up for a psychology study conducted by the mysterious Dr. Shields, she thinks all she'll have to do is answer a few questions, collect her money, and leave. But as the questions grow more and more intense and invasive and the sessions become outings where Jess is told what to wear and how to act, she begins to feel as though Dr. Shields may know what she's thinking...and what she's hiding"--
Book cover for "Never let me go"
Star rating for Never let me go
Average Rating:
3.8 stars
Description:
"As children Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy were students at Hailsham, an exclusive boarding school secluded in the English countryside. It was a place of mercurial cliques and mysterious rules where teachers were constantly reminding their charges of how special they were. Now, years later, Kathy is a a young woman. Ruth and Tommy have reentered her life. And for the first time she is beginning to look back at their shared past and understand just what it...
Book cover for "Without mercy"
Star rating for Without mercy
Description:
In order to keep an eye on her half-sister, Shaylee, Julia Farentino takes a job at an elite boarding school in Oregon known for turning wayward kids around. Julia is suspicious of the school, because she knows of one student who disappeared, and has never been found. Soon she uncovers disturbing information about previous students.