Dark Academia

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

Showing 161 - 180 of 208  There are a total of 208 valid entries on the list.
Book cover for "My dark Vanessa"
Star rating for My dark Vanessa
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

"[An] exceedingly complex, inventive, resourceful examination of harm and power." —The New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice

"A lightning rod . . . brilliantly crafted."—The Washington Post

Recommended by The New York Times USA Today • Entertainment Weekly • Marie Claire • Elle

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Book cover for "A dark and drowning tide"
Star rating for A dark and drowning tide
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"A sharp-tongued folklorist must pair up with her academic rival to solve their mentor's murder in this lush and enthralling sapphic fantasy romance from the New York Times bestselling author of A Far Wilder Magic."--
Book cover for "Belladonna"
Star rating for Belladonna
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"For readers of Elena Ferrante and Sally Rooney, a lush, coming-of-age novel set in 1950s Italy that stares into the heart of longing and at the friendships that have the power to save and destroy us. Isabella is beautiful, inscrutable, and popular. Her best friend, Bridget, keeps quietly to the fringes of their Connecticut Catholic school, watching everything and everyone, but most especially Isabella. In 1957, when the girls graduate, they land...
Book cover for "The practice, the horizon, and the chain"
Star rating for The practice, the horizon, and the chain
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"The boy was raised as one of the Chained, condemned to toil in the bowels of a mining ship out among the stars. His whole world changes--literally--when he is yanked 'upstairs' and informed he has been given an opportunity to be educated at the ship's university alongside the elite. Overwhelmed and alone, the boy forms a bond with the woman he comes to know as 'the professor,' a weary idealist and descendent of the Chained who has spent her career...
Book cover for "A mastery of monsters"
Star rating for A mastery of monsters
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Description:
"When August's brother disappears before his sophomore semester, everyone thinks the stress of college got to him. But August knows her brother would never have left her voluntarily, especially not after their mother so recently went missing. The only clue he left behind was a note telling her to stay safe and protect their remaining family. And after August is attacked by a ten-foot-tall creature with fur and claws, she realizes that her brother...
Book cover for "Punish the sinners"
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Book cover for "Gaudy night"
Star rating for Gaudy night
Series:
Average Rating:
4.8 stars
Book cover for "Iron & embers"
Star rating for Iron & embers
Description:
"Wren Embervale, alchemist-turned-assassin, finds solace in only one thing: seeking vengeance for the death of her friends. The wars of the past may be over, but her thirst for revenge is far from quenched. For years, she has been content with her poisons and potions for company, but when an unknown form of alchemy is used to attack a king of the midrealms, Wren's time in the shadows comes to an end. She's offered a place at the ancient alchemy academy...

169. Vicious

Book cover for "Vicious"
Star rating for Vicious
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Average Rating:
4.7 stars
Description:
Victor and Eli started out as two brilliant but arrogant college students who recognized the same sharpness and ambition in each other. In their senior year, a shared research interest in adrenaline, near-death experiences, and semmingly supernatural events reveals an intriguing possibility: that under the right conditions, someone could develop extraordinary abilities. But when their thesis moves from the academic to the experimental, things go horribly...
Book cover for "Ghosts of Harvard"
Star rating for Ghosts of Harvard
Average Rating:
3.5 stars
Description:
"Cadence "Cady" Archer arrives on Harvard's campus searching for answers about her brother, a schizophrenic genius who leapt from his dorm room window the year before. Eric's brilliance overshadowed Cady growing up, but she worshipped and adored him--even as he became more unstable, retreating deeper into his secretive work on multidimensional spacetime and isolating himself from everyone around him. Losing Eric has left a black hole in Cady's life,...
Book cover for "Frankenstein"
Star rating for Frankenstein
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:

Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus, was completed by Mary Shelley at the age of 19. She infused this original novel with Gothic and Romantic elements. Scientist Victor Frankenstein creates a large and powerful creature in the likeness of man, but is disgusted by his own creation and he abandons the being to fend for itself. Spawning generations of horror stories in the genre, Frankenstein is a gruesome warning against playing

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Book cover for "The cartographers"
Star rating for The cartographers
Average Rating:
3.7 stars
Description:
"What is the purpose of a map? Nell Young's whole life and greatest passion is cartography. Her father, Dr. Daniel Young, is a legend in the field and Nell's personal hero. But she hasn't seen or spoken to him ever since he cruelly fired her and destroyed her reputation after an argument over an old, cheap gas station highway map. But when Dr. Young is found dead in his office at the New York Public Library, with the very same seemingly worthless...
Book cover for "Prep"
Star rating for Prep
Average Rating:
3.4 stars
Description:
During the late 1980s, fourteen-year-old Lee Fiora leaves behind her close-knit, middle-class Indiana family to enroll in an elite co-ed boarding school in Massachusetts, becoming a shrewd observer of, and eventually a participant in, their rituals and customs.
Book cover for "The ancient nine"
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Book cover for "The broken girls"
Star rating for The broken girls
Average Rating:
4.5 stars
Description:
Vermont, 1950. There's a place for the girls whom no one wants--the troublemakers, the illegitimate, the ones too smart for their own good. It's called Idlewild Hall, and local legend says the boarding school is haunted. Four roommates bond over their whispered fears, their friendship blossoming--until one of them mysteriously disappears... Vermont, 2014. Twenty years ago, journalist Fiona Sheridan's elder sister's body was found in the overgrown...
Book cover for "Tell us no secrets"
Star rating for Tell us no secrets
Average Rating:
2 stars
Description:
At an exclusive East Coast boarding school, when seventeen-year-old sophisticated troublemaker Zoey Spalding plays a game with the class list--if you lose your virginity you get a star by your name--it sets in motion a chain of shocking events that leads to murder.
Book cover for "Silvercloak"
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"Two decades ago, the Bloodmoons ruthlessly murdered Saffron Killoran's parents, destroying her idyllic childhood. Hell-bent on revenge, she lies her way into Silvercloak Academy--the training ground for her city's elite order of detectives--with a single goal: to bring the Bloodmoons to justice. But when Saff's deception is exposed, rather than being cast out, she's given a rare opportunity: to go undercover and tear the Bloodmoons down from the...
Book cover for "This Place Kills Me:"
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Book cover for "The secret history"
Star rating for The secret history
Author:
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
Under the influence of a charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at a New England college discover a way of thought and life a world away from their banal contemporaries. But their search for the transcendent leads them down a dangerous path, beyond human constructs of morality.

180. Real life

Book cover for "Real life"
Star rating for Real life
Average Rating:
4.3 stars
Description:
"A novel of rare emotional power that excavates the social intricacies of a late-summer weekend -- and a lifetime of buried pain. Almost everything about Wallace, an introverted African-American transplant from Alabama, is at odds with the lakeside Midwestern university town where he is working toward a biochem degree. For reasons of self-preservation, Wallace has enforced a wary distance even within his own circle of friends -- some dating each other,...