Ninth House

by Leigh Bardugo

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Leigh Bardugo’s Ninth House is a dark academia novel packed with murder, mystery, and ghosts. When Alex Stern, who has the uncanny talent to communicate with the dead, is offered a spot in Yale’s incoming freshmen class, she’s more than skeptical of her acceptance. With paranormal occurrences and shady secret societies, Ninth House has earned its spot as your next binge read. Who knew ghost communication was a coveted skill at Yale?

"The best fantasy novel I’ve read in years, because it’s about real people... Impossible to put down." —Stephen King

Enter a mesmerizing world of power, privilege, and dark magic among the Ivy League elite in the first book in the Alex Stern series.

Goodreads Choice Award Winner
Locus Finalist

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 one of the world’s most prestigious universities on a full ride. What’s the catch, and why her?

Still searching for answers, Alex arrives in New Haven tasked by her mysterious benefactors with monitoring the activities of Yale’s secret societies. Their eight windowless “tombs” are the well-known haunts of the rich and powerful, from high-ranking politicos to Wall Street’s biggest players. But their occult activities are more sinister and more extraordinary than any paranoid imagination might conceive. They tamper with forbidden magic. They raise the dead. And, sometimes, they prey on the living.

Don't miss the highly-anticipated sequel, Hell Bent.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250313089
Publisher:	Flatiron Books
Publication date:	10/08/2019
Series:	Alex Stern Series , #1
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	448
File size:	19 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Leigh Bardugo is a #1 New York Times bestselling author of fantasy novels and the creator of the Grishaverse (coming soon to Netflix) which spans the Shadow and Bone Trilogy, the Six of Crows Duology, The Language of Thorns, and the King of Scars duology. Her short stories can be found in multiple anthologies, including Best American Science Fiction&Fantasy. Leigh was born in Jerusalem, grew up in Southern California, and graduated from Yale University. These days she lives and writes in Los Angeles.
LEIGH BARDUGO is the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of The Familiar and the Ninth House series, and the creator of the Grishaverse, which spans the Shadow and Bone trilogy (now a Netflix series), the Six of Crows duology, the King of Scars duology—and much more. Her short fiction has appeared in multiple anthologies, including The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. She lives in Los Angeles and is an associate fellow of Pauli Murray College at Yale University.

Editorial Reviews

Bardugo's greatest power is ushering readers of any age through big, cast-heavy books with clarity and narrative precision. She is great at crime capers and misdirection…Bardugo makes unexpectedly strong rivers of stories, purposed by swift currents of feeling. As you step further into the nasty and confusing dark of Ninth House, you feel for her caught-up characters. That's what usually gets discarded first in these genres when writers get distracted by world-building or struggle with plot. But Bardugo's characters feel real—and she doesn't forget that everyone hurts.

The New York Times Book Review - Choire Sicha

"Ninth House is the best fantasy novel I’ve read in years, because it’s about real people. Bardugo’s imaginative reach is brilliant, and this story—full of shocks and twists—is impossible to put down." - Stephen King

"Ninth House is one of the best fantasy novels I’ve read in years. This book is brilliant, funny, raw and utterly magnificent — it's a portal to a world you’ll never want to leave." - Lev Grossman, New York Times bestselling author of The Magicians

"Ninth House is the best thing I’ve read in a long time. There’s so much magic here that you'll begin to feel it seeping into the room around you as you read, and characters so real you ’ll practically hear their voices in your ear. Leigh Bardugo has written a book so delicious, so twisty, and so immersive I wouldn’t blame you for taking the day off to finish it." - Kelly Link, author of Magic for Beginners and Get in Trouble.

"Leigh Bardugo's Ninth House rocked my world. I could not get enough of sinewy, ghost-haunted Alex Stern, a heroine for the ages. With a bruised heart and bleeding knuckles, she risks death and damnation — again and again — for the people she cares about. I was cheering her on the whole way: from the first brilliant sentence of this book to the last. More, please, Ms. Bardugo." - Joe Hill, New York Times bestselling author of NOS4A2

"In this mesmerizing novel, Leigh Bardugo introduces us to Alex, a high-school dropout who gets a free ride to Yale because of a unique talent. Bardugo's New Haven is plausible and frightening, and I was one rapt reader." - Charlaine Harris, bestselling author of the True Blood series

"With an aura of both enchantment and authenticity, Bardugo's compulsively readable novel leaves a portal ajar for equally dazzling sequels." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Atmospheric...Part mystery, part story of a young woman finding purpose in a dark world." - Booklist (starred review)

"Genuinely terrific....The worldbuilding is rock solid, the plot is propulsive, and readers will be clamoring for a sequel as soon as they read the last page." - Library Journal (starred review)

"Excellent....Bardugo gives [her protagonist] a thoroughly engaging mix of rough edge, courage and cynicism." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)

From the Publisher

★ 2019-07-01
Yale's secret societies hide a supernatural secret in this fantasy/murder mystery/school story.

Most Yale students get admitted through some combination of impressive academics, athletics, extracurriculars, family connections, and donations, or perhaps bribing the right coach. Not Galaxy "Alex" Stern. The protagonist of Bardugo's (King of Scars, 2019, etc.) first novel for adults, a high school dropout and low-level drug dealer, Alex got in because she can see dead people. A Yale dean who's a member of Lethe, one of the college's famously mysterious secret societies, offers Alex a free ride if she will use her spook-spotting abilities to help Lethe with its mission: overseeing the other secret societies' occult rituals. In Bardugo's universe, the "Ancient Eight" secret societies (Lethe is the eponymous Ninth House) are not just old boys' breeding grounds for the CIA, CEOs, Supreme Court justices, and so on, as they are in ours; they're wielders of actual magic. Skull and Bones performs prognostications by borrowing patients from the local hospital, cutting them open, and examining their entrails. St. Elmo's specializes in weather magic, useful for commodities traders; Aurelian, in unbreakable contracts; Manuscript goes in for glamours, or "illusions and lies," helpful to politicians and movie stars alike. And all these rituals attract ghosts. It's Alex's job to keep the supernatural forces from embarrassing the magical elite by releasing chaos into the community (all while trying desperately to keep her grades up). "Dealing with ghosts was like riding the subway: Do not make eye contact. Do not smile. Do not engage. Otherwise, you never know what might follow you home." A townie's murder sets in motion a taut plot full of drug deals, drunken assaults, corruption, and cover-ups. Loyalties stretch and snap. Under it all runs the deep, dark river of ambition and anxiety that at once powers and undermines the Yale experience. Alex may have more reason than most to feel like an imposter, but anyone who's spent time around the golden children of the Ivy League will likely recognize her self-doubt.

With an aura of both enchantment and authenticity, Bardugo's compulsively readable novel leaves a portal ajar for equally dazzling sequels.

Kirkus Reviews