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Even if you’re no longer a student, you can always go back to class each fall with a good campus novel. The campus novel, A.K.A. the academic novel, focuses its story entirely on a college or university campus.
Purists might suggest these books are limited to higher education, but the campus novel can also encompass boarding school stories.
For some readers, the campus novel is nostalgic as they reminisce about their own time at college. For others, the campus novel is fantastical or an opportunity to try on an experience unlike their own, whether or not they themselves went to a college or university.
Bestselling author and campus novelist R. F. Kuang often describes the setting as a sort of fairyland or fairytale–they’re places of ambition and promise, as much as they’re places filled with exclusivity and cruelty.
Campus novels create an immersive world where the setting is a crucial character in the book. These books typically feature young adults out on their own for the first time, learning how to navigate a new place with new people, new responsibilities, and more freedom than they have likely ever experienced before. They can also focus on the faculty and staff on those campuses.
Because campus novels run on a well-established timeline—the semester or the quarter—a story and relationships can play out in ways that most readers are familiar. And since campus novels are about setting and not genre, they can encompass everything from mystery to horror to fantasy to contemporary; they’re especially ripe for readers who love books that braid several genres together.
Some examples of the campus novel include:
Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution by R. F. Kuang
Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas
Come and Get It by Kiley Reid
The Late Americans by Brandon Taylor
Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
Want more? Head on over here to dive deeper into the history of the campus novel, as well as discover even more great reads. – KJ
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