Drearcliff Grange School Books in Order

The Drearcliff Grange School books take the old boarding-school story and twist it into something stranger, darker, and much more fun. On the surface, Drearcliff is a school in Somerset. Beneath that, it is a place for unusual girls, especially the daughters of criminal masterminds, outlaw scientists, magicians, and other people respectable society would rather not talk about. Some of the pupils have gifts of their own, and some of those gifts are not easy to keep hidden.

At the center of the series is Amy Thomsett.

Amy arrives at Drearcliff after her mother finds her sleeping on the ceiling, which tells you a lot about the tone right away. She is clever, curious, and brave, but she is also new to this world, which makes her a good guide for the reader. As Amy learns the rules of the school, she also starts to see how fragile those rules really are. There are rivalries, cliques, teachers with secrets, strange lessons, and hidden histories threaded through the place.

The first book, The Secrets of Drearcliff Grange School, leans into conspiracies and club-room adventure. When a girl disappears, Amy and her friends form the Moth Club and begin digging into what is really happening behind the school's respectable front. That gives the story a strong mystery spine, but it also leaves room for friendship, loyalty, school politics, and the delight of watching girls with odd talents start to work out what they can do.

Then the walls get thinner.

In The Haunting of Drearcliff Grange School, the series keeps the school-story pleasures but pushes further into ghostly threat. Amy is older, more confident, and more aware of the dangers circling her. The Moth Club has history now. So does the school. A haunting that might once have seemed like a side problem becomes something much more personal and much more dangerous. Newman also widens the world a little, showing that Drearcliff is part of a larger network of weird institutions and inherited grudges.

What makes these books work is their balance. They have secret passages, cloaks, odd laboratories, tutors with suspicious motives, and supernatural threats, but they never forget the pleasures of the school setting itself. Dormitory friendships matter. So do crushes, anxieties, rival schools, rules that make no sense, and the question of who you become when adults keep telling you what sort of person you are supposed to be.

The tone is lighter on its feet than some of Newman's darker work, but it is never soft. There is real menace here, and real emotional stakes. If you like stories about found families, clever girls, hidden powers, and institutions that are a little more haunted than they first appear, this is one of the friendliest doors into Newman's fiction.