Dark Academia

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

Showing 1 - 20 of 137  There are a total of 208 valid entries on the list.
Book cover for "Sirens & muses"
Star rating for Sirens & muses
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"The lives of four artists are forever altered by the desires, protests, and ambitions that lure and unsettle them in this magnetic novel. It's 2011: America is in a deep recession and Occupy Wall Street is escalating. But at the elite Wrynn College of Art, students paint and sculpt in a rarified bubble, dreaming only of disproving the notion that in art, everything has already been done. Louisa Arceneaux is a thoughtful, observant nineteen-year-old...
Book cover for "All's well"
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Average Rating:
3 stars
Description:
"Miranda Fitch['s] ... life is a waking nightmare after an accident ruins her acting career, and leaves her with chronic back pain, a failed marriage, and a deepening dependence on painkillers and alcohol. On the verge of losing her job as a college theater director, Miranda lives out her broken dreams through an upcoming production of Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well, when the unimaginable happens. She suddenly recovers, but at what cost?"--...

3. Bunny

Book cover for "Bunny"
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Average Rating:
3.8 stars
Description:
"Samantha Heather Mackey couldn't be more of an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at New England's Warren University. A scholarship student who prefers the company of her dark imagination to that of most people, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort--a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other "Bunny," and are often found entangled in a group hug so tight they become one. But everything...
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 "The idiot"
Star rating for The idiot
Average Rating:
3.5 stars
Description:
"The year is 1995, and email is new. Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives for her freshman year at Harvard. She signs up for classes in subjects she has never heard of, befriends her charismatic and worldly Serbian classmate Svetlana, and, almost by accident, begins corresponding with Ivan, an older mathematics student from Hungary. Selin may have barely spoken to Ivan, but with each email they exchange, the act of writing seems to take...
Book cover for "The widow of Rose House"
Star rating for The widow of Rose House
Average Rating:
4.5 stars
Description:
"A young widow restores a dilapidated mansion with the assistance of a charming, eccentric genius, only to find the house is full of dangerous secrets in this effervescent Gilded Age debut novel."--Provided by publisher.
Book cover for "Book of night"
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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 "Shady Hollow"
Star rating for Shady Hollow
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Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"The first book in the Shady Hollow series, in which we are introduced to the village of Shady Hollow, a place where woodland creatures live together in harmony--until a curmudgeonly toad turns up dead and the local reporter has to solve the case. Reporter Vera Vixen is a relative newcomer to Shady Hollow. The fox has a nose for news, so when she catches wind that the death might be a murder, she resolves to get to the bottom of the case, no matter...
Book cover for "The atlas six"
Star rating for The atlas six
Series:
Atlas volume 1.
Average Rating:
3.5 stars
Description:
"The Alexandrian Society, caretakers of lost knowledge from the greatest civilizations of antiquity, are the foremost secret society of magical academicians in the world. Those who earn a place among the Alexandrians will secure a life of wealth, power, and prestige beyond their wildest dreams, and each decade, only the six most uniquely talented magicians are selected to be considered for initiation. Enter the latest round of six: Libby Rhodes and...
Book cover for "Long black veil"
Star rating for Long black veil
Average Rating:
3 stars
Description:
"On a warm August night in 1980, six college students sneak into the dilapidated ruins of Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary, looking for a thrill. With a pianist, a painter, and a teacher among them, the friends are full of potential. But it's not long before they realize they are locked in--and not alone. When the friends get lost and separated, the terrifying night ends in tragedy, and the unexpected, far-reaching consequences reverberate...
Book cover for "Tell me everything"
Star rating for Tell me everything
Average Rating:
4.3 stars
Description:
In her first weeks at Hawthorne College, Malin is swept up into a tight-knit circle that will stick together through all four years. There's Gemma, an insecure theater major from London; John, a tall, handsome, wealthy New Englander; Max, John's cousin, a shy pre-med major; Khaled, a wisecracking prince from Abu Dhabi; and Ruby, a beautiful art history major. But Malin isn't like the rest of her friends. She's an expert at hiding her troubled past....
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 "Possession"
Star rating for Possession
Average Rating:
4 stars
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 searching dead"
Star rating for The searching dead
Series:
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"Dominic Sheldrake has never forgotten his childhood in fifties Liverpool or the talk an old boy of his grammar school gave about the First World War. When his history teacher took the class on a field trip to France it promised to be an adventure, not the first of a series of glimpses of what lay in wait for the world. Soon Dominic would learn that a neighbor was involved in practices far older and darker than spiritualism, and stumble on a secret...
Book cover for "The emperor of Ocean Park"
Star rating for The emperor of Ocean Park
Average Rating:
2.5 stars
Description:
After the death of his father, the flamboyant and controversial Judge Oliver Garland, his son Talcott must unravel the truth about his father's life, a quest that brings him face to face with old scandals and family secrets.
Book cover for "The city of brass"
Star rating for The city of brass
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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 "Whisper down the lane"
Star rating for Whisper down the lane
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
"Two narratives--Richard in present day, settingling into a quiet but pleasant life as a newly married art teacher; Sean in 1980s Virginia, when cult leaders, serial killers, and stranger danger are on the rise--converge around a few small lies that spiraled into a terrible tragedy. Thirty years later, it seems someone is out for revenge."--