Recommendations
Books Like If We Were Villains
What to read after If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio
If If We Were Villains' combination of dark academia atmosphere — the Shakespeare conservatory, the seven students who share every role and every class and every meal — and the retrospective mystery of who died and why left you wanting more, these are the novels readers find next.
- 1Buy
The Secret History
by Donna Tartt
An elite classics study group at a small Vermont college commits a murder. The novel If We Were Villains is directly descended from — the same closed academic world, the same charismatic professor, the same complicit group, the same retrospective narration. Read together, they define the dark academia genre.
- 2Buy
Ninth House
by Leigh Bardugo
A young woman with a troubled past is recruited to monitor Yale's secret societies, which practice actual magic. The supernatural dark academia response to the same tradition — the same institutional power structure and the same question of who is allowed to access it, made more explicitly sinister.
- 3Buy
The Secret Place
by Tana French
A year after a teenage boy was found murdered outside an elite Dublin girls' school, a student brings a new clue to the detective who originally investigated. Tana French writes detective fiction that is also literary fiction about privilege, group loyalty, and the specific closeness of institutions that cut students off from the world outside.
- 4Buy
Babel
by R.F. Kuang
A group of students at Oxford's Royal Institute of Translation in 1830s England discovers that the silver-work magic that runs the British Empire requires an act of betrayal — and must decide whether to support or destroy the institution that made them. The most ambitious dark academia fantasy novel in recent years.
- 5Buy
The Atlas Six
by Olivie Blake
Six magicians are invited to join the Alexandrian Society, an elite secret society with an impossible library — and told that only five of them will survive the year. Dark academia with explicit fantasy elements and a more ensemble-driven approach than If We Were Villains.
- 6Buy
Special Topics in Calamity Physics
by Marisha Pessl
A precocious 16-year-old follows her charismatic father from college town to college town until their final year, when she becomes involved with an extraordinary teacher and her clique — and then the teacher dies. More satirically postmodern than If We Were Villains but operating in the same space of a young person's obsessive relationship with an institution and the death that defines it.
- 7Buy
The Magicians
by Lev Grossman
A teenager discovers a college for magic that actually exists, attends it, and learns that the knowledge of real magic doesn't make anything easier. The fantasy novel most directly descended from The Secret History — an elite magical institution, morally compromised students, and the central question of what happens when you get what you wanted and it doesn't help.
- 8Buy
Donna Tartt's The Little Friend
by Donna Tartt
Tartt's second novel — a 12-year-old girl in 1970s Mississippi investigates her brother's childhood death. Less atmospheric than The Secret History or The Goldfinch, and the one Tartt readers are most divided on — but essential for understanding the full range of what Tartt does when the setting is not an elite institution.
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