The Atlas Six

Olivie Blake

Mar 2022 · Atlas Series Book 1 · Macmillan Audio · Narrated by Andy Ingalls, Caitlin Kelly, Damian Lynch, David Monteith, James Patrick Cronin, Munirih Grace, Siho Ellsmore and Steve West

About this audiobook

The much-acclaimed BookTok sensation from Olivie Blake, The Atlas Six is now newly revised, edited with additional content, and available on audio for the first time.

• The tag #theatlassix already has millions of views on TikTok

• A dark academic debut fantasy with an established cult following that reads like The Secret History meets The Umbrella Academy.

• The first in an explosive trilogy

The Alexandrian Society, caretakers of lost knowledge from the greatest civilizations of antiquity, are the foremost secret society of magical academicians in the world. Those who earn a place among the Alexandrians will secure a life of wealth, power, and prestige beyond their wildest dreams, and each decade, only the six most uniquely talented magicians are selected to be considered for initiation.

Enter the latest round of six: Libby Rhodes and Nico de Varona, unwilling halves of an unfathomable whole, who exert uncanny control over every element of physicality. Reina Mori, a naturalist, who can intuit the language of life itself. Parisa Kamali, a telepath who can traverse the depths of the subconscious, navigating worlds inside the human mind. Callum Nova, an empath easily mistaken for a manipulative illusionist, who can influence the intimate workings of a person’s inner self. Finally, there is Tristan Caine, who can see through illusions to a new structure of reality—an ability so rare that neither he nor his peers can fully grasp its implications.

When the candidates are recruited by the mysterious Atlas Blakely, they are told they will have one year to qualify for initiation, during which time they will be permitted preliminary access to the Society’s archives and judged based on their contributions to various subjects of impossibility: time and space, luck and thought, life and death. Five, they are told, will be initiated. One will be eliminated. The six potential initiates will fight to survive the next year of their lives, and if they can prove themselves to be the best among their rivals, most of them will.

Most of them.

A Macmillan Audio production from Tor Books.

Ratings and reviews

I enjoyed this a lot! Classic magical boarding school / grad school setup, fun mechanics and characters. The audiobook readers are pretty bad, though. Every ten minutes or so there's a mispronunciation or weird emphasis that pulls me out of the story. By the second book, I'm seriously wondering if these are AI voices.

It's a very interesting storyline but, it feels as if the author is trying to prove to a father figure how intelligent they are. I really like the plot, it's a refreshing idea. Trying to find a character that I can champion was probably the most difficult part.

Wants to be a philosophy book more than it wants to be a work of fiction, but the philosophy is fragmented. The characters behave erratically, and it's not clear who we're supposed to identify with.

About the author

Olivie Blake is the pseudonym of Alexene Farol Follmuth, a lover and writer of stories. She has penned several indie SFF projects, including the webtoon Clara and the Devil with illustrator Little Chmura and the BookTok-viral Atlas series. As Alexene, she is the author of the young adult rom-com My Mechanical Romance. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, new baby, and rescue pit bull.