10 cult books that capture the drama of university life

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

This one is the blueprint for “dark academia”, the literary trend taking over TikTok. But the original is the best: open Donna Tartt’s first novel and you’ll enter the secretive, elitist world of strange Classics students at a New England liberal arts college. The story is told through the eyes of Richard Papen, who lies about his less than elite upbringing to impress his fellow students, and finds himself drawn into dark acts and terrible secrets. It’s an utterly compelling narrative, with unforgettably odd characters, and littered with Greek references that will make you consider changing your degree. It’s also a lesson in being truthful about your past during freshers week.

Stoner by John Williams

If you find yourself a little too transfixed by campus life and start considering academia as a career path, this novel will disabuse you of the notion. It was published in 1965 and forgotten for years — thank God it was rediscovered. William Stoner is a farmer’s son who becomes a professor of literature. Nothing very much happens outside the realm of ordinary life, but that is what makes this tragedy so arresting. He marries the wrong woman, has an affair, is estranged from his daughter, makes all the foolish mistakes and suffers all the tiny disappointments we must endure in life. Its smallness is what makes this moving story a real masterpiece. It’s far from uplifting, but just too good to leave off the list. If you haven’t read it, do it now.

Vladimir by Julia May Jonas

Here’s one about campus life from the professors’ point of view — and it’s pretty filthy. Our unnamed narrator is a 50-something English professor whose husband is also a professor. While she laments her waning sexual power, he has been sneaking off with his students — and now a group of them have lodged a #MeToo-style complaint. But every time you think you know where the story is going, the brilliantly tricksy Julia May Jonas changes tack. The narrator is furious with the women who have accused John of wrongdoing. When their enraged adult daughter asks her, “But didn’t you understand there was a power dynamic?” she responds: “Of course, but aren’t we attracted to power?” Her own actions become even more morally murky than her husband’s behaviour. Altogether, this novel is electrifying — one to devour in an afternoon.

Real Life by Brandon Taylor

Wallace is a graduate in biochemistry at a Midwestern university; he is black among mainly white students, and his father has just died. But Wallace hasn’t told anyone. He’s a solitary creature, more interested in his petri dishes than social events, but he feels his estrangement deeply. Over the course of just a few days his graduate project is sabotaged, he argues with a white, female student about misogyny and he develops a sexual relationship with a male friend who purports to be straight. The novel is, by all accounts, action-packed, yet the tone is strangely calm and lethargic. It’s melodrama meets introspection; A Little Life in a laboratory. Brandon Taylor’s depiction of everyday racism is as careful and scrupulous as his character’s nematode cultivation.

The Idiot by Elif Batuman

It’s only natural to be nervous about starting university — but you’ll never be as neurotic as Selin, the protagonist of Elif Batuman’s hilarious yet cerebral debut novel. Selin is the daughter of Turkish immigrants in her first year at Harvard, studying linguistics and Russian, but when she’s not puzzling over conjugations, she’s trying to figure out the more complex social constructions of campus life. Her one real friend, Svetlana, seems to understand exactly how everything works, while Selin is left scrambling in the dark. Meanwhile, she forms a deep obsession with an enigmatic Hungarian maths student, who toys with her feelings until she follows him to his home country for the summer. It sounds like a series of unfortunate events, but actually it’s deeply heartwarming — a reminder that everyone is just as confused as you are. Batuman’s sequel Either/Or is just as fun.

Jill by Philip Larkin

Philip Larkin — our great tortoise-poet of stale dreams and perpetual middle age — was once a frightened fresher. In his final year of university, in a not particularly relatable act of procrastination, he dashed off an entire novel. Jill is a tale of teenage angst about a naive northerner called John and his disastrous first term in wartime Oxford. For anyone nervous about university, it’s probably best avoided — the reader is forced to watch helplessly as John is slowly pummelled towards a nervous breakdown by loneliness, a sexual awakening he has no capacity to navigate, and his charming scumbag of a roommate, posh boy Christopher. The writing feels zingily contemporary, 80 years on: careless Christopher, vomiting, stealing, copying John’s essays and rewarding him with the occasional pub trip, is still a thriving species at universities today. So watch out.

Normal People by Sally Rooney

This was the novel everyone was talking about when I was at university — you could spot its lime-green cover poking out of a tottering book pile in every bombsite bedroom. I first sat down to read it on Christmas Day, craving a break from a heavily medieval literature degree, and suddenly life seemed to zip off the pages and sting me, like a squirt of lemon to the eye. At the end of the first chapter I thought: this is the writer I’ve been waiting for. Normal People is the second novel by the Irish virtuoso Sally Rooney and it’s also her best. It’s about the passionate, disjointed love affair between two clever teenagers, from their school days in Sligo to university in Dublin. Critics who accuse her writing of coldness miss the counterbalance: those astonishing sentences about love — bloody with warmth and sentiment — that sometimes burst through the dry pages like mountain springs. Read it.

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

If it’s dreaming spires, drunken dips in ancient fountains and boys with floppy hair and secretive aristocratic families you’re after, this is it. Evelyn Waugh wrote the book (yes, literally) on the quintessential posh Oxbridge experience, but it’s much more than that. The strait-laced Charles Ryder falls under the spell of careless, loveable Sebastian Flight and, gradually, of his tortured Catholic family too. It’s a story that sprawls across years and covers obsession, growing up and deeply buried love. It’s dark, really dark, and in the end devastating. It also makes university sound more about booze than bachelor’s degrees, which, to be fair, it mostly is.

Gaudy Night by Dorothy L Sayers

Harriet Vane — famous detective novelist and free agent, fresh from a murder trial — heads back to her old Oxford college (yes, I’m afraid a lot of the older campus novels are set at Oxford) for a reunion dinner with some trepidation. Well, this is 1935, and being accused of murdering her lover hasn’t exactly done wonders for Harriet’s reputation. But inside the quiet libraries and cosy studies of Shrewsbury College, she discovers sanctuary: an all-female enclave of companionship, eccentricity and piercing scholarship. And when a strange poltergeist starts terrorising the college, Harriet decides she has to stick around and get to the bottom of it. “What are you to do with the people who are cursed with both hearts and brains?” A whodunnit with a heart, the questions this astonishing and criminally neglected novel raises echo down the years.

Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis

Larkin’s friend Kingsley wrote his own campus novel, Lucky Jim, published in 1954. The story is simple: Jim Dixon, a second-rate history lecturer at a fourth-rate university (so called), is constantly in trouble — with his job, with women, with everything. It’s important reading for any student because it contains the best description of a hangover in contemporary fiction: “His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.”

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