The Five of Us

Summary

Dark academia is turned inside out in The Five of Us, an unsettling, propulsive thriller where home is not a sanctuary, isolation looms, and the future has evaporated. All that’s left is fear, frustration, and an anger that won’t go away.

Meet Crow, Goldfinch, Starling, Wren, and Cuckoo—five girls who will never tell you their real names. They’re the brightest students at an underfunded, inner-city Bristol school, pushing toward opportunity despite the odds stacked against them. They believe they’re on the cusp of something better … until the world abruptly shuts down. Exams are cancelled, their plans collapse, and the future dissolves into a fog of uncertainty.

With long nights, a city under curfew, and nothing left to lose, the girls slip into a world of dark possibility. Each illicit outing becomes its own kind of dangerous magic. Their choices spiral—from reckless to ruthless—and by the end of a strange, suspended summer, more than one person will be dead.

Seven years later, the survivors have not spoken since. But someone knows what happened. Someone who has been watching. Hunting. Taunting. As they stumble through an adulthood they were never prepared for—and reckon with all the wounds of a generation left behind—the rage that bound them together in the past resurfaces with lethal force.

They broke the rules. And now the rules may end up breaking them.