Get your first book for just $5.

Join today!

We’ll make this quick.

First, enter your email. Then choose your move.

By pressing "Pick a book now" or "Pick a book later", you agree to Book of the Month’s Terms of use and Privacy policy.

Get your first book for just $5.

Join today!
undefined

You did it!

Your account is now up to date.

get the appget the app

Our app is where it’s at.

Unlock our Reading Challenge, earn prizes, and get notified of new books on our app.

Our app is where it’s at.

Unlock our Reading Challenge, earn prizes, and get notified of new books on our app.

get the ios appget the android app

Already have the app? Explore here.

get the ios appget the android app
Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo

Fantasy

Ninth House

by Leigh Bardugo

Excellent choice

Just enter your email to add this book to your box.

By pressing "Add to box", you agree to Book of the Month’s Terms of use and Privacy policy.

Quick take

A secret Yale society is into some spooky stuff. Like off-record surgical prophecies and real, live (dead?) ghosts.

Good to know

  • Illustrated icon, 400

    400+ pages

  • Illustrated icon, Magical

    Magical

  • Illustrated icon, Graphic_Content

    Graphic violence

  • Illustrated icon, Sexual_Content

    Sexual Content

Synopsis

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. By age twenty, in fact, 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 elite universities on a full ride. What’s the catch, and why her?

Still searching for answers to this herself, Alex arrives in New Haven tasked by her mysterious benefactors with monitoring the activities of Yale’s secret societies. These eight windowless “tombs” are well-known to be haunts of the future rich and powerful, from high-ranking politicos to Wall Street and Hollywood’s biggest players. But their occult activities are revealed to be more sinister and more extraordinary than any paranoid imagination might conceive.

Free sample

Get an early look from the first pages of Ninth House.

Ninth House

Prologue

Early Spring

By the time Alex managed to get the blood out of her good wool coat, it was too warm to wear it. Spring had come on grudgingly; pale blue mornings failed to deepen, turning instead to moist, sullen afternoons, and stubborn frost lined the road in high, dirty meringues. But sometime around mid-March, the slices of lawn between the stone paths of Old Campus began to sweat themselves free of snow, emerging wet, black, and tufty with matted grass, and Alex found herself notched into the window seat in the rooms hidden on the top floor of 268 York, reading Suggested Requirements for Lethe Candidates.

She heard the clock on the mantel tick, the chiming of the bell as customers came and went in the clothing store below. The secret rooms above the shop were affectionately known as the Hutch by Lethe members, and the commercial space beneath them had been, at varying times, a shoe store, a wilderness outfitter, and a twenty-four-hour Wawa mini-mart with its own Taco Bell counter. The Lethe diaries from those years were filled with complaints about the stink of refried beans and grilled onions seeping up through the floor—until 1995, when someone had enchanted the Hutch and the back staircase that led to the alley so that they smelled always of fabric softener and clove.

Create a free account!

Sign up to see book details, our quick takes, and more.

By pressing "Sign up", you agree to Book of the Month’s Terms of use and Privacy policy.

Why I love it

I adore Leigh Bardugo’s YA books—the shippable characters (I’m a Kanej ride or die), the deeply lived-in worlds, the breakneck audacity of her plotting. All of that can be found in her adult debut, but Ninth House ticks with a different kind of heartbeat. It’s a tale of threadbare survival, a pick-up-the-jagged-pieces story that kicks off long after its hard-baked heroine’s life has already fallen apart.

Since she was a kid Alex Stern has been able to see ghosts, an awful ability that’s precluded her attempts to lead a normal life. She drifts early into a world of dangerous men, her life on the skids until she makes a devil’s deal: in exchange for a free ride to Yale, she’ll use her ghostly ability to work for Lethe House. Lethe was formed to serve as supernatural sheriff to the university’s eight secret societies—practitioners of arcane magic. But after the murder of a local girl and the possibly related disappearance of her closest Lethe colleague, Alex learns how far the societies will go to avoid policing.

In these pages Alex embarks on the journey all of us have longed for: she steps nimbly through the looking-glass, into a world of untold wonders. But the enchantments she finds have claws and teeth and puppet strings, manipulated by some very wicked hands. The sandbox Bardugo has built for herself—one of looming tombs and papery autumn skies, haunted by the searchlight eyes of the dead—feels limitless. I want to watch her build (and raze) castles in it for a hundred more books.

Other books in this series

Member ratings (22,985)

Fantasy
Starling House
Heartless Hunter
The Lost Story
A Fate Inked in Blood
Five Broken Blades
Ink Blood Sister Scribe
The Unfortunate Side Effects of Heartbreak and Magic
The Kingdom of Sweets
Hera
A Sorceress Comes to Call
Hell Bent
Kaikeyi
Weyward
The Unmaking of June Farrow
The Fragile Threads of Power
Beasts of Extraordinary Circumstance
The Book of Magic
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
The Rules of Magic
A History of Wild Places
Gods of Jade and Shadow
The City We Became
A River Enchanted
The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina
Piranesi
Thistlefoot
Half Sick of Shadows
Ariadne
Ninth House
The Invisible Hour
Clytemnestra
Sourdough
Siren Queen
The Last Tale of the Flower Bride
Fate of the Fallen
Immortal Longings
Practical Magic
Fantasy
View all
Starling House
Heartless Hunter
The Lost Story
A Fate Inked in Blood
Five Broken Blades
Ink Blood Sister Scribe
The Unfortunate Side Effects of Heartbreak and Magic
The Kingdom of Sweets
Hera
A Sorceress Comes to Call
Hell Bent
Kaikeyi
Weyward
The Unmaking of June Farrow
The Fragile Threads of Power
Beasts of Extraordinary Circumstance
The Book of Magic
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
The Rules of Magic
A History of Wild Places
Gods of Jade and Shadow
The City We Became
A River Enchanted
The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina
Piranesi
Thistlefoot
Half Sick of Shadows
Ariadne
Ninth House
The Invisible Hour
Clytemnestra
Sourdough
Siren Queen
The Last Tale of the Flower Bride
Fate of the Fallen
Immortal Longings
Practical Magic