
10 Campus Novels for Autumn
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This is a guest post from Laura Oosterbeek. Laura is a Promiscuous Reader and Book Club Slut who spends her time biking around looking for sidewalk cats and browsing bookstalls. She is obsessed with Donna Tartt and drinks her coffee black. Originally from Aotearoa New Zealand, she lives in Cambridge UK.
Misty mornings, long nights, bikes, backpacks, and books. Autumn is the season of the student. Whether you’re a student in need of a fictional escape, a hopeful applicant longing to spend hours in a dusty library, or one who is nostalgic for the hallowed halls you left behind—these books are for you.
I first tried to read Possession a few years ago, but I was too flighty and impatient for the carefully constructed prose and intertextual underpinnings of this novel. But this time around it was exactly those things that made me love it. The novel follows a pair of scholars uncovering the secrets of two Victorian poets, and a literary mystery turns into a treasure hunt. Possession perfectly articulates the obsession of academia.
A recent addition to the campus canon, The Lesser Bohemians is a stream of consciousness novel about a young Irish girl beginning drama school in London. Difficult to get into, but easy to get lost in. It will have you gasping for air.
A young Turkish girl finds herself cold and alone at Oxford University. Captivated by the beauty, but suspicious of the people, she finds herself questioning her faith and femininity under the scrutinising gaze of an eccentric and rebellious professor.
Author M.L. Rio is a graduate student and Shakespeare fanatic who also has an intriguing and witty tumblr. So when I saw she’d written a novel I knew I had to read it. If We Were Villains is centered around the fourth year drama students at Dellecher Classical Conservatory, and the drama within and without their academic pursuits. Riddled with quotes from the Bard himself, this book is sex, drugs, and Shakespeare.
Overshadowed by its older sibling (Man Booker Winner The Luminaries) Eleanor Catton’s debut novel is a dark echo of the classic coming of age novel. She writes about the rawness and readiness of growing up, and the undeniable power young people have over the world around them.
Misty mornings, long nights, bikes, backpacks, and books. Autumn is the season of the student. Whether you’re a student in need of a fictional escape, a hopeful applicant longing to spend hours in a dusty library, or one who is nostalgic for the hallowed halls you left behind—these books are for you.