The Golden Enclaves is the third and final book of Naomi Novik's Scholomance trilogy, published by Del Rey on 27 September 2022 and following A Deadly Education (2020) and The Last Graduate (2021). It was a finalist for the Hugo Award and was named one of the best books of the year by Paste and Publishers Weekly.
El Higgins has done the impossible: she has come out of the Scholomance alive, without becoming the destroying dark witch her great-grandmother's prophecy promised, and she and her allies got everyone else out with her. The reprieve does not last. Someone else has taken up the work of tearing down the enclaves, London is already under attack, and the wizard world is sliding into an enclave war that will kill most of the people El just saved. Chasing the reason why, El uncovers the true price on which every enclave in the world was founded — and finds that undoing it means going back into the school she spent four years trying to escape.
Where the first two books are dark academia set almost entirely inside one lethal school, the finale opens out across the modern world — London, New York, Wales, Portugal, Beijing, Dubai and Mumbai — and turns the trilogy's central question outward, from how to survive an institution to what an institution costs the people it was never built to protect. Novik keeps El's dense, sardonic first-person voice throughout, and readers describe a book that trades set-piece action for accumulating dread, grief and moral reckoning before its resolution.