Leaves are turning, air is cooling, and I’ve packed away my summer skirts. This means only one thing: It’s back to school season, and I can’t get enough of the campus novel genre.
Academic life can be a such an intense experience. A college campus, boarding school, or even run-of-the-mill high school is a wonderfully charged setting for themes of ambition, power, sex, longing, love, and other formative encounters. And fiction around this theme can display great internal and psychological drama, along with a fevered insider view.
Let’s go back to school! Hit the books with my favorite Campus Novels:
Americanah by Chimamanda Nogzi Adichie
Americanah, a novel that is both is absorbing and enlarging, tells the story of a young Nigerian woman who immigrates to the U.S. to attend university. Published in 2013, Americanah was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
Published over 30 years ago, this novel is the first of Donna Tartt’s succesful works (followed by The Little Friend, The Goldfinch, and more). The thriller-mystery gives a moody mix of insular and sinister as it follows a clutch of students attending an elite New England college.
Admission by Jean Hanff Korelitz
An entertaining peek into the morally complex world of the college admissions process. If you like this novel — as I did — Korelitiz continues the insider theme, this time on writing and publishing, with The Plot and The Sequel (to be published in October 2024).
Russo is a master of academia insight with a good dose of wry. With a mix of humor and pathos, this novel delivers my favorite story combination: frustrated writer and university life.
My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell
This 2020 novel is a dark and disturbing exploration of the psychological dynamic between a teenage girl and her magnetic and manipulative teacher. It's an intense and compelling story delivered with the steady hand of masterful writing.
If you like the student-seduced-by-professor genre, this 2013 novel delivers an erotic, and chaotic, ride. Choi revisits the academic theme again with Trust Exercise, published in 2019.
Your Turn: What am I missing? There are loads of books in the campus novel genre, and I’m in the mood for more! What should I read next?
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