The Academy

About The Academy

After more than two decades of Nantucket-set adult fiction, Elin Hilderbrand's 2025 novel The Academy marks a deliberate change of both setting and audience: a young-adult boarding-school series co-written with her daughter, Shelby Cunningham. Set at Tiffin Academy, a New England prep school that jumps seventeen spots to become the country's #2-ranked boarding school just as an anonymous gossip app called Zip Zap starts exposing every student's and staff member's secrets, the book follows a rotating cast -- an international-influencer queen bee, a suspiciously young new history teacher, a transfer student determined not to fit in, and an admissions director with unconventional methods -- through a year where nobody's reputation is safe.

Hilderbrand has described The Academy as the first of a planned two-book series, with a sequel already under contract; it has also drawn early attention as a TV development project. It represents Hilderbrand's first solo genre pivot into YA and her first published co-writing collaboration with her daughter.