Dark Academia

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

Showing 141 - 160 of 208  There are a total of 208 valid entries on the list.

141. Mrs. S

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Description:
"In an elite English boarding school where the girls kiss the marble statue of the famous dead author who used to walk the halls, a butch antipodean outsider arrives to take up the antiquated role of "matron." Within this landscape of immense privilege, where difference is met with hostility, the matron finds herself unsure of her role, her accent and her body. That is until she meets Mrs. S, the headmaster's wife, a woman who is her polar opposite--an...
Book cover for "Voice like a hyacinth"
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"Five young women eager for success rely on the unspeakable to make their dreams come true in a chilling novel about martyrdom, ritual, and obsession by the author of We Ate the Dark."--Provided by publisher.
Book cover for "The awakening"
Star rating for The awakening
Series:
Zodiac Academy volume 1.
Average Rating:
4.7 stars
Description:
"I'm a Gemini. Impulsive. Curious. Headstrong. A twin. Heir to a throne I know nothing about. And it turns out, I'm Fae. But of course there's a catch--all I have to do to claim my birth right is prove that I'm the most powerful supernatural in the whole of Solaria. And sure, technically that' s true as I'm the daughter of the Savage King. But the bit they didn't put in the brochure was that every single Fae in this Kingdom would claim my throne if...
Book cover for "Melmoth"
Star rating for Melmoth
Average Rating:
2 stars
Description:
"It has been years since Helen Franklin left England. In Prague, working as a translator, she has found a home of sorts--or, at least, refuge. That changes when her friend Karel discovers a mysterious letter in the library, a strange confession and a curious warning that speaks of Melmoth the Witness, a dark legend found in obscure fairy tales and antique village lore"--

145. Quicksand

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Average Rating:
3.8 stars
Description:
"A mass shooting has taken place at a prep school in Stockholm's wealthiest suburb. Maja Norberg is eighteen years old and on trial for her involvement in the massacre where her boyfriend and best friend were killed. When the novel opens, Maja has spent nine excruciating months in jail awaiting trial. Now the time has come for her to enter the courtroom. But how did Maja, the good girl next door who was popular and excelled at school, become the most...
Book cover for "Special topics in calamity physics"
Star rating for Special topics in calamity physics
Average Rating:
4.3 stars
Description:
Having moved from one academic outpost to another throughout her childhood, Blue van Meer attends the elite St. Gallway School in her senior year, where the deaths of a teacher and student awaken her analytical instincts. A darkly funny coming-of-age novel and a richly plotted suspense tale told through the distinctive voice of its heroine, Blue van Meer. After a childhood moving from one academic outpost to another with her father (a man prone to...
Book cover for "Her daughter's mother"
Star rating for Her daughter's mother
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
"In this gripping and emotional domestic suspense debut for fans of The Perfect Mother, a newly pregnant woman inadvertently befriends her egg donor--only to find herself a key suspect when the woman vanishes without a trace"--
Book cover for "True story"
Star rating for True story
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"A "mind-blowing, page-turning, unputdownable" novel (Elif Batuman) about the fifteen-year fallout from a poisonous high school rumor, exploring how stories from the past can come to define who we are. A gifted and reclusive ghostwriter, Alice Lovett makes a living helping other people tell their stories. But she is haunted by the one story she cannot tell: the story of, as she puts it, "the things that happened while I was asleep." Back in 1999,...
Book cover for "Delphi"
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Description:
"Covid-19 has arrived in London, and the entire world quickly succumbs to the surreal, chaotic mundanity of screens, isolation, and the disasters small and large that have plagued recent history. As our unnamed narrator--a classics academic immersed in her studies of ancient prophecies--navigates the tightening grip of lockdown, a marriage in crisis, and a ten-year-old son who seems increasingly unreachable, she becomes obsessed with predicting the...
Book cover for "The Latinist"
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Description:
"In this wickedly sharp, propulsive debut, a classicist must outmaneuver her manipulative mentor. Tessa Templeton has thrived at Oxford University, under the tutelage and praise of esteemed classics professor Christopher Eccles. Yet shortly before her thesis defense, Tessa learns that Chris has sabotaged her career--and realizes their relationship is not at all what she believed. Driven by what he mistakes as love for Tessa, Chris has ensured that...
Book cover for "Second sight"
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Average Rating:
3 stars
Description:
Venetia Milton earns big bucks photographing the artifacts owned by the brooding Gabriel Jones, whom she also manages to seduce, but after hearing that he is dead, she is stunned when he winds up on her doorstep very much alive and afraid for his life.
Book cover for "The black hour"
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Average Rating:
2.3 stars
Description:
"For Chicago sociology professor Amelia Emmet, violence was a research topic--until a student she'd never met shot her. He also shot himself. Now he's dead and she's back on campus, trying to keep up with her class schedule, a growing problem with painkillers, and a question she can't let go: Why? All she wants is for life to get back to normal, but normal is looking hard to come by. She's thirty-eight and hobbles with a cane. Her first student interaction...
Book cover for "Juniper & Thorn"
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Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"Marlinchen and her two sisters live with their wizard father in a city shifting from magic to industry. As Oblya's last true witches, she and her sisters are little more than a tourist trap as they treat their clients with archaic remedies and beguile them with nostalgic charm. Marlinchen spends her days divining secrets in exchange for rubles and trying to placate her tyrannical, xenophobic father, who keeps his daughters sequestered from the outside...
Book cover for "A study in drowning"
Star rating for A study in drowning
Author:
Average Rating:
3.7 stars
Description:
"Effy Sayre has always believed in fairy tales. Haunted by her visions of the Fairy King since childhood, she's had no choice. Her tattered copy of Angharad--Emrys Myrddin's epic about a mortal girl who falls in love with the Fairy King, then destroys him--is the only thing keeping her afloat. So when Myrddin's family announces a contest to redesign the late author's estate, Effy feels certain it is her destiny"--
Book cover for "The guest lecture"
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Description:
"With "a voice as clear, sincere, and wry as any I've read in current American fiction" (Joshua Cohen), Martin Riker's poignant and startlingly original novel asks how to foster a brave mind in anxious times, following a newly jobless academic rehearsing a speech on John Maynard Keynes for a surprising audience. In a hotel room in the middle of the night, Abby, a young feminist economist, lies awake next to her sleeping husband and daughter. Anxious...
Book cover for "Graveyard shift"
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Average Rating:
2 stars
Description:
"Every night, in the college's ancient cemetery, five people cross paths as they work the late shift: a bartender, a rideshare driver, a hotel receptionist, the steward of the derelict church that looms over them, and the editor-in-chief of the college paper, always in search of a story. One dark October evening in the defunct churchyard, they find a hole that wasn't there before. A fresh, open grave where no grave should be. But who dug it, and for...
Book cover for "If we were villains"
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Average Rating:
3.8 stars
Description:
On the day Oliver Marks is released from jail, the man who put him there is waiting at the door. Detective Colborne wants to know the truth, and after ten years, Oliver is finally ready to tell it. A decade ago: Oliver is one of seven young Shakespearean actors at Dellecher Classical Conservatory, a place of keen ambition and fierce competition. In this secluded world of firelight and leather-bound books, Oliver and his friends play the same roles...

158. Enigma

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Average Rating:
3.7 stars
Description:
"Salem Salazar is a Mortimer University legacy and the black sheep of her scandal-ridden, wealthy family. Obsessed with death, she arrives at Mortimer on the hunt for answers about what happened to her perfect, missing older sister. There, she discovers that her sister is far from the only girl to have gone missing at Mortimer. Salem will do anything to discover what dark forces are killing Mortimer's students... even if it means using herself as...
Book cover for "The shadow of the wind"
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Series:
Average Rating:
4.1 stars
Description:
"I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetary of Forgotten Books for the first time..." Barcelona, 1945: A city slowly heals in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, and Daniel, an antiquarian book dealer's son who mourns the loss of his mother, finds solace in a mysterious book entitled The Shadow of the Wind, by one Julián Carax. But when he sets out to find the author's other works, he makes a shocking discovery: someone has been...

160. Gothikana

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Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"An outcast her entire life, Corvina Clemm is left adrift after losing her mother. When she receives the admission letter from the mysterious University of Verenmore, she accepts it as a sign from the universe. The last thing she expects though is an old, secluded castle on top of a mountain riddled with secrets, deceit, and death. An enigma his entire life, Vad Deverell likes being a closed book but knowing exactly everything that happens in the...