And I looked up from this letter, and I found myself on this street. I mean, I remember very clearly being a freshman and walking down the street from the post office reading a letter because we read and wrote letters back then. When did you start thinking about making this book? Was it all the way back when you were an undergrad and you thought, wow, this would make a really, really interesting book someday?īARDUGO: I think there's no question that the mystery of these places and these organizations pulled me in very early. But I am not a shape-shifter, as far as you know. I was in Wolf's Head, one of the ancient eight. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Are you allowed to talk about it?īARDUGO: I mean, I'm pretty sure that a special ops team won't descend from above. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Were you part of a secret society at Yale? GARCIA-NAVARRO: You went to Yale, though. So that is the Ninth House to which Alex is brought.

Since you have a bunch of undergraduates tampering with the supernatural forces, another house, a kind of oversight house, had to be created to keep them from quite literally raising hell. The Ninth House was formed because these eight secret societies - and the societies are very real, although the magic they practice is my invention. She can see ghosts or what are referred to as Grays in Ninth House. What is that talent? Tell us about Galaxy.īARDUGO: She can see through the veil to the other side. But she has a talent that catches the eye of occult Yale recruiters. She's a high-school dropout, a former drug addict with a dark past. GARCIA-NAVARRO: At the center of this book is Galaxy Stern, also known as Alex. LEIGH BARDUGO: Thank you so much for having me. Leigh Bardugo joins us now to talk about her book. In bestselling author Leigh Bardugo's new novel 'Ninth House,' these clubs are reimagined as places where actual dark arts are performed in a Yale flooded with ghosts and driven by witchcraft. Yale University's secret societies are the stuff of legend, bastions of privilege that set you up for a life of connections, wealth and power.

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