9 Fantasy Books With Secret Societies, Hidden Orders and Forbidden Knowledge

The first thing I want to know when a fantasy novel introduces a secret society is what its members are afraid of losing. At Leigh Bardugo’s Yale, powerful people have rituals to protect. In R. F. Kuang’s Oxford, an empire depends on who gets to study translation. And in Erin Morgenstern’s underground archive, the stories themselves are worth keeping hidden.

These nine fantasy books take that premise in different directions. Start with Ninth House for occult societies and a murder mystery, The Rook for supernatural espionage, or The Starless Sea if you want to spend a little longer exploring what’s behind the door. The recommendations below keep the major reveals under wraps.

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Which fantasy book should you read first?

1. Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo

Alex Stern can see ghosts, a talent that gets her to Yale and into Lethe House. Lethe monitors the university’s occult societies, whose privileged members practice magic behind closed doors. When a young woman is murdered, Alex has reason to question the limits of that oversight.

Giving Alex an oversight role is what makes this my first pick. She can get close enough to learn how the societies work while seeing all the ways they protect their own. If what you want is a fantasy novel that makes you suspicious of every invitation, start here. It’s a dark read, with sexual violence and abuse.

Find Ninth House on Amazon (hardcover)

2. The Atlas Six by Olivie Blake

The Alexandrian Society recruits six gifted magicians and offers them a chance at membership and access to knowledge preserved from the ancient Library of Alexandria. Only five are expected to make it through initiation.

That sixth seat gives the book its tension. Someone who helps you work through a difficult piece of magic today might decide tomorrow that you’re the easiest person to cut. Choose this one if you want to watch talented, ambitious people study one another as closely as they study magic.

Find The Atlas Six on Amazon (paperback)

3. Babel by R. F. Kuang

Robin Swift studies at Oxford’s Royal Institute of Translation, where meanings that slip between languages can be turned into magic through silver. Britain’s empire runs on that power. The clandestine Hermes Society offers Robin a way to work against the institution that educated him.

What stays interesting here is how directly the magical system leads to the book’s political questions. Oxford needs people who can think across languages, and it also wants to control what they do with that skill. Pick Babel for a standalone historical fantasy about loyalty, complicity, and who benefits when knowledge has gatekeepers.

Find Babel on Amazon (hardcover)

4. The Will of the Many by James Islington

Vis Telimus enters the elite Catenan Academy with a false identity and a mission that could expose him. Beyond the academy, an empire consolidates power through a system in which people of lower rank cede their Will to those above them.

There’s a particular pleasure in reading an academy story where every success carries a risk. Vis needs to excel to get closer to the information he came for, and every success gives the people watching him another reason to ask who he is. Reach for this one if you want the hidden history to matter on an epic fantasy scale. It opens the Hierarchy series.

Find The Will of the Many on Amazon (hardcover)

5. The Rook by Daniel O’Malley

Myfanwy Thomas wakes in a London park surrounded by bodies and with no memory of who she is. Letters from her former self tell her that she’s a senior operative in the Checquy, a secret organization that handles supernatural threats. Someone inside the agency wants her dead.

The letters make this an especially good mystery about a secret organization. Myfanwy has access to an insider’s knowledge, but she has to decide which of that insider’s judgments she can trust. The mix of office politics, espionage, and strange supernatural abilities also gives this list its funniest entry.

Find The Rook on Amazon (trade paperback)

6. The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

Graduate student Zachary Ezra Rawlins finds a library book that describes a moment from his own childhood. Following its clues leads him to an underground world where stories are collected and guarded, and where different people have very different ideas about what it takes to keep them safe.

This is the one I’d choose for the pleasure of exploring. The tales nested inside Zachary’s story make the archive feel like a place you could wander for hours and still miss an entire room. If you want to linger over strange images and connections, give this one an unhurried evening.

Find The Starless Sea on Amazon (hardcover)

7. The Book of Doors by Gareth Brown

New York bookseller Cassie Andrews inherits a book that makes it possible to step through a door and come out somewhere else. Then she meets Drummond Fox, the guardian of a secret library of magical books, and learns how much danger comes with owning one.

This is a good pick if you want the secret library to set a pursuit in motion. Every ordinary doorway becomes a possible escape route, and the existence of other books raises an immediate question. What could someone do with several of them at once?

Find The Book of Doors on Amazon (hardcover)

8. Vita Nostra by Marina Dyachenko and Sergey Dyachenko

Sasha Samokhina is pressured into attending the Institute of Special Technologies, where she struggles through exercises she barely understands. The teachers know what those exercises are doing to her and give her little room to refuse. Julia Meitov Hersey translated the novel into English.

Few books make it so unsettling to watch a student finally grasp a lesson. Here, understanding the material changes Sasha, and the school gets to decide how much she knows about that process. Pick this if you like the teacher-student tension of dark academia and want a story that takes it somewhere stranger.

Find Vita Nostra on Amazon (English-language hardcover)

9. The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins

Carolyn and the other children raised by a figure they call Father each learned a different branch of knowledge from his library. When Father disappears, the library becomes the center of a struggle among people trained to do things the rest of the world can hardly imagine.

The rule that each pupil studies a separate branch makes their relationships especially unnerving. They know one another as family, yet each has blind spots about what the others can do. This is my pick for readers who want cosmic horror and dark humor with their forbidden knowledge. Expect graphic violence and cruelty.

Find The Library at Mount Char on Amazon (paperback)

If the Yale societies are the part you want to explore further, see our Leigh Bardugo books in order guide. For more gothic campuses and academic rivalries, browse our best dark academia books.

Follow us on Instagram and Facebook