Head Back to the Quad with These 15 Campus Novels

by Brandon Taylor

Keeping his head down at a lakeside Midwestern university where the culture is in sharp contrast to his Alabama upbringing, an introverted African-American biochem student endures unexpected encounters that bring his orientation and defenses into question.

by Elif Batuman 

Embarking on her freshman year at Harvard in the early tech days of the 1990s, a young artist and daughter of Turkish immigrants begins a correspondence with an older mathematics student from Hungary while struggling with her changing sense of self, first love and a daunting career prospect.

by Elaine Hsieh Chou

While finishing her PhD dissertation on the late canonical poet Xiao-Wen Chou, graduate student Ingrid Yang discovers a curious note in the archives and upends her entire life trying to unravel the note’s message, ultimately making an explosive discovery.

by Julia May Jonas

With her husband Vladimir under investigation for inappropriate relationships with his former students, a popular English professor finds their extra-marital pursuits taking a toll on their relationship, while a married young novelist becomes dangerously obsessed with Vladimir, threatening to blow their life wide open.

by Weike Wang

At first glance, the life of the novel's narrator seems ideal: she is studying for a prestigious PhD in chemistry that will make her Chinese parents proud, and her successful boyfriend has just proposed to her. But instead of feeling hopeful, she is wracked with ambivalence. Soon it all becomes too much and her life plan veers off course.

by Tom Wolfe

At Dupont University, Charlotte Simmons—a beautiful, brilliant, but sheltered college freshman—learns that her intellect alone will not help her thrive as, for the upper-crust coeds, sex, cool, and kegs trump academic achievement every time. She is seduced by the heady glamour of acceptance, betraying both her values and upbringing before she grasps the power of being different and the exotic allure of her own innocence.

by Daisy Florin Alpert

In 1998, Isabel Rosen, a senior at Wilder College, left reeling by a nonconsensual sexual encounter, embarks on an affair with her married writing professor, a man with secrets of his own, that shakes the foundation of who she thinks she is, for better and worse.

by Haley Jakobson

When her best friend from childhood gets engaged, college sophomore Savannah Henry is pulled back into a history she had just barely begun to heal from while falling in love with Wes, a sweet, nonbinary classmate.

by Bronwyn Fischer

Eighteen-year-old Natalie has just arrived at her first year of university in Toronto, leaving her remote, forested hometown for the big, impersonal city. She meets Nora, an older woman who takes an unexpected interest in her, and Natalie is drawn into an all-consuming affair with her. As the secrets multiply and the intensity of the romance threat­ens to overwhelm her, Natalie realizes that the new, adult identity she had imagined for herself is far from the one she’s actually coming to know.  

by Sally Rooney

The unconventional secret childhood bond between popular Connell and lonely, intensely private Marianne is tested by character reversals in their first year at a Dublin college that render Connell introspective and Marianne social, but self-destructive.

by J.K. Chukwu

Sahara, a queer, half-Nigerian college sophomore who feels like an all-around failure, finds hope, answers, and unexpected redemption when she sets out to find the truth about The Unfortunates—the unlucky subset of Black undergrads who have been mysteriously disappearing.

by Scott Johnston

A satirical parody of tribal university culture follows the riotous clashes between a conservative professor awaiting tenure, a socialite-turned-militant feminist, and a popular career student who fights for his top-dog status.

by Mandy Berman

The senior-year plans and postgraduate ambitions of two college friends are complicated by their love triangle with a visiting literature professor who is navigating a fading career, a failing marriage and a checkered reputation.

by Mark Prins

When her ex-professor sabotages her career, determined to prove he has her best interests at heart, Oxford-educated Tessa Templeton scrambles to undo the damage, and in the process, makes a discovery about an obscure second-century Latin poet that could launch her career, finally freeing her from his influence.

by Sara Shepard

Told in multiple points of view, a story of intrigue, sabotage and secrets follows a tight-knit college community as it is rocked to its core when a hacker dumps 40,000 people’s emails onto an easily searchable database, which results in murder.