We’re not done with 90 degree temps around here, but the mornings have gotten blessedly crisp again … which makes me want to buy school supplies. And read campus novels!
This time of year brings back nostalgia for school days gone by, and thankfully, as a reader, I know exactly how to channel those feelings—and that is into the pages of a good book.
It’s been several years since I last shared about some of my favorite novels with school settings and I’ve come across so many more titles since then, both brand new and backlist. Today’s list includes a little bit of everything, from literary fiction to mystery to historical fantasy. There’s no overlap with the previous lists and even then, it was still hard to narrow down the selections to these 20 titles! I hope you’ll add your favorite campus novels to the comments for even more fall reading enjoyment.
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This much-anticipated follow-up to the 2019 sensation Such a Fun Age does NOT disappoint. In this dark campus comedy of manners, Reid tracks the intersecting lives of a University of Arkansas Resident Advisor, the girls on her floor, and a visiting professor working on her next book—all of whom are dealing with a painful recent loss. Don’t expect a tight plot with clear beats: instead, this is a multi-faceted portrait of women and money, power dynamics, race and privilege, the complexities of campus life, and the search for hope and security in the midst of them. Reid excels at maneuvering her characters into precarious situations and watching them squirm. This literary page-turner does not center Greek life, but if you couldn’t look away from #RushTok coverage, add this to your list! Please note content warnings galore. More info →
Team member Leigh recommended this on the team WSIRN summer favorites episode. From Leigh: A riveting YA fantasy retelling of the King Arthur legend, this follows Bree, a 16-year-old Black girl, as she goes off to an early college program. Once there, she discovers magic exists, and that someone’s messed with her memory of the night her mom died. She wants to get to the bottom of what actually happened, which includes infiltrating a secret society on campus. There are so many great layers and twists to this story, which examines racism, complicated grief, and generational trauma. More info →
Many people consider this 1965 historical work set at the turn of the twentieth century to be a modern classic. Born to a poor Missouri farming family, William Stoner is caught between two worlds when his father sends him to University of Missouri to study agronomy and discover the future of farming. He becomes an English literature major instead but nothing goes according to plan. He marries the “wrong” woman, he’s not suited for the politics of academia, his parents don’t fit in with his new life, and so on. In many ways, his is an unremarkable life but that is what allows the prose to shine. More info →
This historical fantasy is a cool 545 pages in hardcover, and WOW does Kuang put every one to good use. Set primarily in 1830s Oxford, the workers at the translation institute Babel literally fuel the British Empire by combining their language skills with precious silver bars. While I loved the academic setting and band of four fast friends, Kuang’s engagement with the complexities of race, power, and privilege are what really ground the novel. There’s also a lot of philosophizing about the art of translation and discussion of what the practice actually involves, which I found insightful and fascinating. The publisher calls it “a thematic response to The Secret History and a tonal response to Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell”—if that sounds a little cerebral for you, don’t worry; it’s easy to get swept up in the story. More info →
World War I is the backdrop for this historical novel, following classmates Henry Gaunt and Sidney Ellwood. When the book begins, the war is far from their boarding school in the English countryside, aside from learning about the death of deployed friends. Unbeknownst to each other, Gaunt and Ellwood secretly pine for one another, sure their feelings are unrequited. Gaunt, who is half-German, views enlistment as both an escape and a chance to counter the anti-German sentiment his family faces. Unfortunately for him, Ellwood enlists directly after, as do many of their classmates. A gritty, haunting novel that does not shy away from the horrors of war or the joys of first love. More info →
At the opening of this twisty and conflicted campus tale, professional podcaster and erstwhile professor Bodie Kane is summoned back to her New Hampshire boarding school to teach a short course on podcasting for high school students. She tasks them with creating their own podcasts for the course, and—even though she knows she shouldn’t—she pushes the students to create a true crime show investigating the long-ago murder of a Granby School student, who happened to be Bodie’s roommate back then. Smart, timely, and unputdownable. More info →
This historical novel centers two young Black women in the 1950s: Ruby is an ambitious high school sophomore in a single-parent family of limited means in Philadelphia; Eleanor is a promising student at Howard University who, despite her working class upbringing, soon finds herself moving in the upper echelon of DC’s Black society. Both women have big hopes and dreams for their futures: they want love and marriage and family, as well as college degrees and satisfying careers. But shortly after each falls in love, big changes happen—and hard choices have to be made. A good story, well-told, with a satisfying ending. Be sure not to miss the author’s note! More info →
Sittenfeld’s debut is a coming-of-age tale following 14-year-old Lee Fiora as she settles in as a scholarship student at her new tony boarding school in Massachusetts. Her middle-class upbringing in South Bend, Indiana is wholly different from that of her wealthy classmates at Ault School. She becomes an astute observer in order to figure out how and where to fit in. This below-the-radar approach serves her well in her early years at the school, but come senior year everything blows up in her face. A riveting exploration of school politics, crushes, wealth, and friendship. More info →
This campus novel takes place at Ohio’s River Valley School for the Deaf, a boarding school where students can count on the cultural richness of the deaf community being celebrated. When Charlie enrolls as a new student, she’s never met another deaf student; her parents had kept her in traditional school for far too long, hoping her issues with hearing would simply disappear once they got her cochlear implants dialed in. Charlie knew that would never happen, and quickly makes herself at home in her new school setting, not knowing the school’s very existence is actively being threatened. I knew little about deafness and the deaf community prior to reading this book, and ate up all the details about various facets of the deaf experience deaf author Nović wove into the story. More info →
This 2018 campus novel, focused on Greek life at Ole Miss, is perfect for back-to-school and football seasons. First line: “I work for four hundred and thirty-eight white ladies in a three-story mansion, not a one of them over the age of twenty-two.” The beautiful cover promises an intriguing, easy-reading novel about sorority life, and it is that—but many readers have been surprised to discover how serious and timely the story is, and how necessary and overdue the changes advocated for in Rush are. Audiophile alert: Bahni Turpin and Amanda Ronconi narrate the excellent audio version. More info →
This reads like a warmer, wittier Sally Rooney, perfect for fans of introspective first-person literary fiction. Rachel is living in London, happily married and pregnant, when she hears the news that one of her long-ago college professors is in a coma. This discovery prompts her to recall a pivotal year in her early twenties, when she met her best friend James working at the bookstore and their lives soon became enmeshed with those of the professor and his wife. A provocative novel with an enticing plot that thoughtfully interrogates themes of power, class, art, and the queer experience. I adored the Irish accents in Tara Flynn’s excellent narration. More info →
If I could tell you about this Pulitzer finalist by quoting the last line, I would! Alas, that might feel spoilery—and so instead I’ll begin at the beginning of this autobiographical novel, in which Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, enters her freshman year at Harvard in 1995 and has to figure out how to use email. As she begins emailing her classmates—and one classmate in particular, a boy named Ivan—she starts to see how the relationships she forms through the written word are markedly different from the ones she creates in the rest of her life. Selin is fascinated by the way language shapes thought, and by the relationship between her actual life and the life lived in books. This may sound quite esoteric, but Selin is warm and funny, as is her first person narrative, and the questions that captivate her will be interesting food for thought for many lovers of literature. More info →
In Wang’s 2017 debut novel, our narrator is a chemistry PhD student who, feeling crushed by her demanding program and exacting Chinese parents, takes a leave of absence. She hopes to use this time to figure out what she really wants to do with her life, and to examine why she can’t just say “yes” when her committed boyfriend keeps pushing the idea of marriage. This literary novel is smartly written, with tight prose and a fascinating structure that serves the story well and makes it feel memoir-esque. I thought the ending was one part abrupt and one part pure brilliance. There’s so much to unpack in a book club setting. (I do want to flag a quick comment about gun violence for the sensitive reader: it caught me off guard, and made me wonder if that topic would have been handled differently were it written now.) More info →
Long (at 640 pages) and sweeping in scope, this spans decades and unfurls the life stories of several generations of one Midwestern family. The story begins in 2011, when Samuel Andresen-Anderson suddenly finds himself embroiled in a professional scandal at the college where he teaches, and almost simultaneously discovers his long-absent mother, who left the family when he was a child, is headline news for throwing rocks at a presidential candidate. We go on to examine the long road that led to her decision to leave the family, her childhood, even the family’s roots back in Norway, where the myth of the Nix—a spirit that follows you for life—originated. Content warnings apply. More info →
From our 2024 Spring Book Preview, Olga Dies Dreaming author Gonzalez returns with a fiery novel set in the worlds of academia and fine art. In 1985, artist Anita de Monte falls to her death during a nasty fight with her husband, the prominent artist Jack Martin, whose fragile ego is threatened by Anita’s burgeoning success. Jack calls it an accident and carries on like nothing happened, but Anita is determined to make him pay. Flash forward to 1998, when Brown art student Raquel is preparing to launch her senior thesis on Martin, but gets sidetracked when she learns of Anita’s forgotten art—and suspicious death. Raquel admires the work and feels a kinship with its creator, another outsider in the art world. Raquel may hang with the white and rich Art History Girls, but as a first generation Puerto Rican college student, she can’t—and doesn’t want to—be mistaken for one. Plus the ways her own aspiring artist boyfriend’s actions resemble Jack’s are deeply unsettling. Smart and sophisticated (and more than a little sweary), this scintillating sophomore effort was everything I hoped for and more. More info →
I didn’t think Sally Rooney was for me. But because I recorded a What Should I Read Next episode with a guest who called Rooney her favorite author, I sampled this one—and then I didn’t want to stop reading! I was captivated by Rooney’s skill at portraying the quietly devastating interactions between Connell and Marianne, Irish teenagers who begin an on-again, off-again relationship (though they wouldn’t call it that) in high school and whose paths continue to cross when they move on to university in Dublin. Her unusual style suits the story, and the acuity with which she probes friendship, trauma, and mental health is striking. More info →
An inside look at the world of academia via letters from the much-leaguered professor of creative writing and literature Jason Fitger. His department faces massive budget cuts, his writing career is on pause, and so is his personal life. We learn it all as Fitger writes abrasive letters of recommendation for students and tells committee members (and everyone else he writes) exactly what he thinks. As entertaining as it is passive-aggressive, which is to say: greatly. More info →
Homegoing author Gyasi delivers another powerful family story about grief, faith, and the power of human connection. Gifty studies neuroscience at Stanford School of Medicine, with a focus on depression and addiction. It’s no coincidence that she’s chosen to study illnesses that impact those she loves most. Her brother, a gifted student and athlete, died of a heroin overdose after a devastating knee injury. Her mother stays in bed, battling depression and grief. As Gifty leans on her work to help her understand her family, she longs for understanding and faith. Quiet, introspective, and piercingly sad, but ultimately hopeful. The audiobook is wonderfully narrated by Bahni Turpin. More info →
This short work of autofiction transports the reader to a European university campus. Adam Gordon is an unhappy young American poet who’s living in Madrid for a year on a poetry fellowship. He’s disillusioned with life and himself and often escapes into drugs and alcohol. While this isn’t a book I would have read if I hadn’t been traveling through Spain at the time, I appreciated the way it approached and talked about language, meaning, and translation. Plus, the strong sense of place and mentions of restaurants and neighborhoods had me googling aplenty—and marveling when I realized we were going to some of the same places mentioned in the book! More info →
This campus mystery, set in the world of the theater and swimming in Shakespeare, begins at the end: Oliver Marks has just been released from jail after serving a ten year sentence, and he’s finally ready to tell the truth. But the truth about what? We slowly learn that ten years ago, Oliver was part of a close-knit group of Shakespearean actors at Dellecher Classical Conservatory, where the offstage rivalries and romances hold just as much drama as their performances. Their final year—the one that lands Oliver in prison—reads more like one of Shakespeare’s tragedies. This page-turning suspense novel is packed with Shakespeare references and perfect for fans of Donna Tartt. More info →
Do you have any favorite campus novels? Please share in the comments.
P.S. 10 campus novels that will take you back to your school days and 25 boarding school novels that are better than your class reunion.
