From Stonerby John Williams (1965) to The Secret History byDonna Tartt (1992), the school campus has long been a home for great fiction. The lawns and libraries, classrooms and common rooms, and dining halls where everyone has a familiar seat.
Students live and learn side by side, maybe away from home for the first time, and try to picture who they might one day be.
Whether it’s a massive university or a small prep school by the water, a campus can feel secluded from the rest of the world. And when things happen, the buildings and syllabi stay the same, but the people inside them do not.
These eight novels all start with that familiar place and show just how much can change by the end.
Sirens & Muses
In a rarefied bubble protected from the 2011 recession and escalation of Occupy Wall Street, four Wrynn College of Art students become deeply entangled in a web of rivalry, passion, and ambition.
When scholarship transfer student Lousa Arceneaux enters an intense romantic and creative relationship with her wealthy prodigy roommate Karina Piontek, and anti-capitalist student provocateur Preston Utley stages an explosive internet hoax targeted at visiting professor and political painter Robert Berger, the group is thrust out of their academic bubble and into the cutthroat New York City art market.
Campusland
Set over an academic year at the prestigious New England Devon University, the book follows an interconnected cast of characters caught in a whirlwind of campus activism and administrative panic.
Eph Russell is an English professor from rural Alabama up for tenure, who finds himself unprepared for elite academia’s rapidly shifting cultural landmines. Lulu Harris is an entitled Manhattan freshman whose main goal is becoming a prominent socialite.
Red Wheeler is a seventh-year trust-fund baby who’s the most “woke” guy on campus, and Milton Strauss is the spineless university president who spends his days desperately trying to appease aggrieved students, wealthy donors, and competing administrators.
Make Your Home Among Strangers
When Lizet Ramirez, the daughter of Cuban immigrants, leaves Miami to attend an ultra-elite college in New York, she becomes the first in her family to navigate the foreign and privileged world of higher education. Her transition is immediately upended by her parents’ sudden divorce and the sale of her childhood home, leaving her family financially unstable and deeply resentful of her departure.
Lizet returns home for Thanksgiving only to find her family completely consumed by a nationwide immigration battle surrounding a young Cuban refugee boy, and we follow Lizet through her academic and social struggles at the predominantly white university,
On Beauty
On Beautyfollows the lives of two academic families—the liberal, secular Belseys and the conservative, religious Kipps—living in the college town of Wellington, Massachusetts.
Starting with the ideological and professional feud between professors Howard Belsey and Monty Kipps, their kids and wives form their own relationships as the families encounter marital infidelities, generational divides, and bitter clashes of art, race, and politics.
King Coffin
Jasper Ammen is a brilliant, arrogant Harvard student influenced by the philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche and Max Stirner and convinced of his own intellectual superiority. So, Ammen decides to commit the “perfect murder” by randomly choosing an innocent victim and executing the crime in front of witnesses who will not understand what is happening.
Inspired by the infamous 1924 Leopold and Loeb case, King Coffin is a glimpse into the mind of a twisted genius against the beautiful backdrop of Harvard University.
The Collective
Joshua Yoon, Eric Cho, and Jessica Tsai arrive at Macalester College with different baggage but the same overpowering ambition to become artists. As the years pass, their tenacity is tested by both an act of campus racism and, as adult roommates in Cambridge, by real-world demands and distractions that ultimately drive them apart.
Eric reflects on these events long after as he tries to make sense of a recent suicide through a remarkable exploration of racial identity and the artist’s role in contemporary America.
Norwegian Wood
It is 1960s Tokyo, and Toru is a quiet 19-year-old Waseda University student, experiencing youthful loneliness, student protests, and a deep emotional pull toward Naoko, the fragile former girlfriend of his late best friend.
As Naoko retreats to a rural sanatorium, Toru tries to hold on to her while simultaneously being drawn to Midori, a fiercely independent classmate who pulls him back into the pulse of the living world.
Flanders Point
In 1955 at Haddam Academy, a small, financially struggling girls’ prep school on Long Island Sound’s Connecticut shore, 18-year-old Charlotte Delafield is dealing with her eccentric parents’ volatile divorce.
Left behind as her family disperses, Charlotte takes a nanny job for a local family in exchange for room and board so she can remain on Flanders Point and finish her education.
At school, she develops a deep connection with her 28-year-old English teacher, Brian Parton, and we follow the increasing emotional pressure as they struggle not to cross any lines until graduation day.
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