Whether you’re preparing for the return to school, looking back with nostalgia on your student life, or are dedicated to the #DarkAcademia aesthetic, here are nine excellent novels set in and around academia. From a gripping story of revenge on campus to the sweeping tale of a life haunted by trauma sustained at boarding school, these books have something for every reading taste.
Set against the backdrop of student revolts in late 1960s Tokyo, Norwegian Wood is a haunting story of young love and loss.
When Toru Watanabe hears the Beatles song ‘Norwegian Wood’ playing at an airport, his thoughts are transported back almost twenty years to his student days and his first love, Naoko, the girlfriend of his former best friend. Toru falls back into memories of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire – and another impetuous young woman, Midori. Norwegian Wood was a breakout hit for Haruki Murakami, and was adapted into a film by Tran Anh Hung in 2010. For anyone looking to revisit the emotional highs and lows of adolescence, this is the perfect book to dive right into.
First-year student Chloe Sevre looks like an ordinary girl next door. She can be whoever you want her to be: cool girl, best friend, model student. But behind the yoga leggings and makeup, you’ll find a calculating killer in the making, enrolled in a secret clinical study of young psychopaths. And when she isn’t studying or partying, she is plotting to kill fellow student Will Bachman.
If you like your campus novels with a thrilling edge, Never Saw Me Coming is an unputdownable read that will have you desperately turning the next page to see what Chloe will do next. Described as ‘Deliciously wicked and utterly addictive’ by Alice Hunter, author of The Serial Killer’s Wife , it is perfect for fans of How to Kill Your Family and You .
As a young man, William Stoner studies agriculture at the University of Missouri, until a seminar on English literature ignites a passion for the humanities. What follows is a quiet life: he decides to become a teacher. He doesn’t fight in World War I. He marries the wrong woman. A love affair with a colleague fizzles out. His academic successes are modest at best. After his death, his colleagues remember him rarely. Yet John Williams’s compassionate novel uncovers a story of universal value – of the conflicts, defeats and victories of the human race that pass unrecorded by history – and in doing so reclaims the significance of an individual existence. This is a novel that will stay with you for years after you’ve read it, called ‘A beautiful, sad, utterly convincing account of an entire life’ by Ian McEwan .
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Overstory Galatea 2.2 is an ingenious reimagining of the Pygmalion myth for the artificial intelligence era. After many years spent in the Netherlands, the young writer Powers returns to the United States to take up a position at his former college. There, he is drawn into an outlandish and irresistible project by an outspoken neurologist: to train a computing system to model the human brain by reading it a canonical list of ‘Great Books’. Through repeated tutorials, the machine – Helen – grows gradually more worldly, until ‘she’ begins to ask questions about her existence. At the same time, Powers tells Helen about his own life, and his turbulent relationship with the woman he left behind in the Netherlands.
When shy college student Greer Kadetsky meets legendary second-wave feminist Faith Frank, her life and politics are changed completely. Faith is influential, glamorous and wealthy, inhabiting a very different world to Greer – but she nevertheless invites Greer into her life, leading her down a thrilling path away from her meant-to-be future with high school sweetheart Cory. A witty novel about ambition, power and friendship, The Female Persuasion melds the personal and political to ask: how do young feminists of the #MeToo generation interact with their older, second-wave counterparts? And what place do these second-wavers have in the women’s movement today? Eva Wiseman, writing for the Observer , described the novel as evoking ‘The sense that we may have smashed a glass ceiling, but now are standing in the shards, discreetly bleeding.’
The first novel in David Lodge’s campus trilogy, Changing Places is a ‘magnificent comic novel’ (Guardian ) following two academics on a six-month cultural exchange, swapping homes and lives.
Conformist British academic Philip Swallow and top-ranking American professor Morris Zapp don’t appear to have much in common at first, but now they are hilariously thrown into each other’s lives on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Nothing and nobody are immune to the exchange: students, colleagues, even wives are swapped as events spiral out of control. And soon both the sun-drenched Euphoric State university and the rain-kissed University of Rummidge turn into hotbeds of intrigue, lawlessness and broken vows. A classic of the campus novel genre, this list would be remiss not to include Changing Places .
Newly arrived at Harvard with no idea what she’s in for, Selin is a tall, highly strung Turkish-American from New Jersey, starting her freshman year in linguistics in the 1990s. She soon makes a new best friend in the cosmopolitan Svetlana, and a maybe-more-than-friend in Hungarian mathematics student Ivan. Selin and Ivan begin an email correspondence, Selin obsessing over whether or not Ivan likes her back – but will either be brave enough to admit to their feelings? And as if all of that isn’t enough, Selin still has to face all the challenges and possibilities of adulthood. A warm and funny coming-of-age story, The Idiot explores language and its limitations, and how baffling love can be when you are still trying to find yourself.
From the bestselling author of Atonement Lessons is a mesmerising new novel about love, regret and a restless search for answers.
While the world is still counting the cost of the Second World War and the Iron Curtain has descended, young Roland Baines’s life is turned upside down. Stranded at boarding school, his vulnerability attracts his piano teacher, Miriam Cornell, leaving scars as well as a memory of love that will never fade. For the remainder of his life, Roland lives a rootless existence, sometimes riding the tide of history, but more often struggling against it. Twenty-five years on, the disappearance of his wife forces him to confront the reality of his life and history, including the spectre of his schooldays that continues to haunt him.
Deep within the archives of time-and-motion pioneer Lillian Gilbreth lies a secret. Gilbreth helped birth the era of mass observation and big data, but did she also discover a ‘perfect’ movement that would change everything?
Young lawyer Monica Dean is at LSE, researching the early history and copyright of time-and-motion studies, when she learns of Gilbreth’s work. Heading to Gilbreth’s archives in Indiana, Dean finds that a box is missing – the box that apparently holds the key to Gilbreth’s greatest discovery. Racing against two other interested parties, Dean begins a hunt for Box 808. But just what is inside it? And who will find it first? From the Booker Prize-shortlisted author of C and Satin Island , The Making of Incarnation is an ambitious novel about technology and human experience.
