Ninth House
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.
Themes & atmosphere
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What you might want to know about Ninth House
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Galaxy Stern, a college dropout with a violent past and the ability to see ghosts, is offered a full ride to Yale on the condition she monitor the campus's eight magical secret societies. Then a town girl is murdered.
Yes. Ninth House (2019) was Leigh Bardugo's first adult novel after a YA career writing the Grishaverse books (Shadow and Bone, Six of Crows). It is darker and more explicit than her earlier work.
Yes. Hell Bent (2023) is the second book in the Alex Stern series. A third book is planned.
Ninth House was written by Leigh Bardugo, published in 2019 by Flatiron Books.
Ninth House is 480 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Ninth House takes most readers 7 to 10 hours to finish.
Ninth House is a standalone novel by Leigh Bardugo, not part of a series.
Ninth House is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.