If You Liked The Secret History, Read These 10 Books Next
Bookdot Team • •
#books like The Secret History#dark academia books#Donna Tartt#If We Were Villains#The Likeness#Ninth House#readalikes#BookTok
You closed the last page of The Secret History and nothing else felt right. Every other book on your shelf seemed louder, flatter, or somehow less sure of itself. That is the Tartt hangover, and it is one of the most specific ones in reading.
Donna Tartt published her debut in 1992, and it has never gone out of fashion. On BookTok it is the book that other books are compared to, the founding text of dark academia. The premise is told in the first paragraphs: a group of students at a small Vermont college killed one of their own, and the narrator will explain how it happened.
So what do you read next? The trap is searching for another book about a murder at a college. The real pull of Tartt’s novel is more particular than that, and the best readalikes borrow one or two of its ingredients rather than the whole recipe. This list is organized around those ingredients.
What Made The Secret History Work
Before the recommendations, it helps to name what we are chasing. Tartt’s novel runs on five things.
The first is the outsider’s longing. Richard Papen, a California kid with a fabricated past, stumbles into Hampden College and into the orbit of five students who study ancient Greek with the charismatic professor Julian Morrow. He wants in more than he wants anything, and the book is partly about what that wanting costs.
The second is the closed circle. Henry, Francis, Bunny, and the twins Charles and Camilla Macaulay are a world of their own, with their own language, rituals, and rules. Nobody outside can really see in.
The third is beauty as an alibi. These students believe that aesthetic and intellectual seriousness lift them above ordinary morality. The Bacchanal that sets the plot in motion is both a thrilling idea and the first domino.
The fourth is the inverted mystery. You know what happens from the beginning. The suspense lives in the slow, dreadful accumulation of how, and in the murder of Edmund “Bunny” Corcoran, which arrives as a consequence rather than a twist.
The fifth is a narrator who tells you too much and not enough. Richard confesses, yet he is also performing, and you spend the novel sensing the gaps.
Keep those five in mind as you read on.
The Closest Matches: Student Circles With Blood on Their Hands
If you want the whole experience over again, start here.
If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio (2017) is the book most often handed to Tartt readers, and for good reason. Seven fourth-year actors at the elite Dellecher Classical Conservatory speak in Shakespeare the way other students speak in slang. When one of them dies, Oliver Marks takes the blame and serves ten years in prison. On his release, the detective who put him there asks for the real story. Rio gives you the closed circle, the beauty-as-alibi theme, and a confessional structure, with the added pleasure that the characters quote Shakespeare in grief and in anger. Pick this one if what you loved was the sense of a group living inside a script.
The Likeness by Tana French (2008) takes the closed circle and drops a detective into it. Cassie Maddox, the undercover cop from French’s In the Woods, is asked to take the place of a murdered graduate student who looks exactly like her and who went by the name Lexie Madison. Cassie moves into a crumbling Irish house called Whitethorn with Lexie’s four housemates, and she begins to fall for their private world even as she investigates it. French’s prose is lush and slow, and the premise requires patience with its implausibility. If you can grant it, it is one of the most seductive books ever written about belonging. Pick it if you loved Richard’s longing to be let in.
Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo (2019) moves the secret society to Yale. Alex Stern, a young woman from a rough background who survived a mass murder, is offered a scholarship at Yale in exchange for working for Lethe, the house tasked with monitoring the university’s eight real-world secret societies, which practice actual magic. The book is darker and more violent than Tartt’s, and it deals plainly with trauma and abuse. Bardugo, a Yale graduate herself, writes the campus with a fond, knowing menace. Pick this one if you want the outsider-in-an-elite-institution theme with a supernatural engine.
For the Psychological Mystery
The Maidens by Alex Michaelides (2021) is a thriller more than a literary novel, but it borrows Tartt’s furniture: Cambridge, a Greek tragedy professor named Edward Fosca who is surrounded by devoted female students, and a series of murders. Mariana, a group therapist grieving her husband, becomes convinced that Fosca is responsible. The prose is much simpler than Tartt’s, and the pacing is brisk. Pick it if you loved the classics-department obsession and want something that moves faster.
Bunny by Mona Awad (2019) is the strangest book here, and the most fun. Samantha Heather Mackey is a scholarship student in an MFA program at Warren University, scornful of a clique of wealthy women who call each other “Bunny.” When Samantha is invited into their private “Smut Salon,” the book slides from campus satire into something nightmarish and funny. It is not a straightforward homage, but it takes the closed circle and turns it inside out. Pick this one if you want to laugh nervously at the same dynamics that Tartt played straight.
Dark Academia With Magic
The Magicians by Lev Grossman (2009) takes the elite school and fills it with spells. Quentin Coldwater, a brilliant and dissatisfied Brooklyn teenager, is admitted to Brakebills, a secret college of magic in upstate New York. What he finds is that magic does not cure unhappiness, and that clever people with power can be deeply careless. Grossman is in conversation with The Secret History as much as with Narnia. Pick it if you want the privilege and the moral rot, with a streak of humor.
Babel by R.F. Kuang (2022) trades Vermont for nineteenth-century Oxford. Robin Swift, orphaned by cholera in Canton and brought to England, is trained in languages at the Royal Institute of Translation, known as Babel. The institute’s silver-working magic depends on the gaps between languages, and on the empire’s appetite for them. It is more openly political than Tartt, and its argument about colonialism is the point. Pick it if you loved the idea of scholarship as a seductive trap and want it to cut deeper.
The Atlas Six by Olivie Blake (2020) is the most BookTok-coded entry. Six of the most gifted magicians of their generation are invited to join the Alexandrian Society, a secret library with the power to rewrite the world, and only five will be allowed to stay. It is full of ambition, rivalry, and charged flirtation, and the plot leans on philosophy as much as on spells. It is also more of a puzzle box than a character study. Pick it if you want a morally gray ensemble.
The Older Ancestors
Tartt did not invent this. She inherited a tradition, and two of its ancestors are worth reading.
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh (1945) is the novel Tartt’s narrator would have loved. Charles Ryder arrives at Oxford and falls for Sebastian Flyte, a charming, self-destructive aristocrat, and then for the entire Flyte family and their grand house. The book is elegiac, Catholic, and fixated on a lost golden summer. It is far gentler than Tartt, but the longing for belonging is the same. Pick it if you loved the nostalgia and the outsider’s gaze.
A Separate Peace by John Knowles (1959) is a short novel about two boys at the Devon School in New Hampshire during World War II. Gene, a cautious student, and Finny, a charismatic athlete, are best friends, and Gene’s jealousy leads to an accident with lasting consequences. It is much shorter than Tartt’s, but it shares her fascination with a golden friend, the narrator’s guilt, and a confession told years afterward. Pick it if you wanted the guilt without the Greek.
How to Choose Your Next Read
If you want the whole Tartt experience, read If We Were Villains. If you want the outsider’s longing, read The Likeness. If you want the setting plus real magic, pick Ninth House or The Magicians. If you want the institution as a trap, Babel is the strongest argument. And if you want the nostalgia without a murder, Brideshead Revisited is waiting.
One tip for dark academia readers: these books are best read slowly and in season. Autumn is the cliché for a reason. The light gets low, the evenings arrive early, and a book about people obsessed with beauty feels almost like a companion.
Why We Keep Returning to Tartt
The Secret History endures because it understands something uncomfortable about reading itself. We love stories about people who are cleverer, more beautiful, and more certain than we are, and we love being let into their rooms. Tartt lets us in, and then lets us watch what that certainty does to them.
The best readalikes keep that discomfort alive. They do not ask you to approve of their characters. They ask you to understand how someone could want to belong badly enough to follow a group anywhere, and how long it takes to see where you have gone.
Keep track of every dark academia read on your TBR and log your own reactions as you go with Bookdot.
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Frequently Asked Questions
- What is the closest book to The Secret History?
- If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio is the nearest match. It follows seven Shakespeare students at an elite conservatory, opens with a death, and unfolds as a confession told years later. Tana French's The Likeness is a close second if you want the same closed circle of brilliant friends with a detective's pull.
- Is The Secret History a mystery or literary fiction?
- It is both. Donna Tartt reveals the murder in the opening pages, so the question is never who did it but how a group of classics students got there. Because of that, readers who like character-driven literary fiction and readers who like mysteries both find a home in it.
- What should I read after The Secret History if I want something less bleak?
- Try The Magicians by Lev Grossman, which keeps the elite-school obsession and the moral rot but adds magic and humor. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh is another gentler option, with the same nostalgia for a golden Oxford summer but without a murder at its center.