Campus Fiction
The intimacy of the social microcosm that is the school or university campus makes for fertile ground for fiction, as students gain a first taste of freedom without the quotidian burdens of adult responsibility. In Alan Warner's The Sopranos, a school choir goes on an alcopop-pop fuelled spree, Eleanor Catton's The Rehearsal offers two takes on the same scandal and, in Mary McCarthy's The Group, privileged graduates consider sex and motherhood in 1930s Manhattan.
Showing 1-16 of 27 Results.
Donna Tartt Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a... | Evelyn Waugh Tells the story of Charles Ryder's infatuation with the Marchmains and the rapidly disappearing world of privilege they inhabit. |
Michael Collins A tale of murder and literary ambition set on an American university campus from a master of the dark side of human nature | Kingsley Amis Jim Dixon is bored by his job as a medieval history lecturer. His days are only improved by pulling faces behind the backs of his superiors as he tries desperately... |
Lionel Shriver Eva never really wanted to be a mother; certainly not the mother of the unlovable boy who murdered seven of his fellow high school students, a cafeteria worker and a... | Zoe Heller From the first day that the beguiling Sheba Hart joins the staff of St George's history teacher Barbara Covett is convinced she has found a kindred spirit. This title explores... |
Michael Chabon A deft parody of the American fame factory and a piercing portrait of young and old desire, WONDER BOYS is a modern classic from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of THE... | Muriel Spark; Candia McWilliam Romantic, heroic, comic and tragic, unconventional school mistress Jean Brodie has become an iconic figure in post-war fiction. Her glamour, unconventional ideas and manipulative charm hold dangerous sway over her... |
Eleanor Catton A high-school sex scandal jolts a group of teenage girls into a new awareness of their own potency and power. But when the local drama school decides to turn the... | Philip Larkin An account of a young English undergraduate from the provinces, this portrait of Oxford during the war is now regarded by many critics as a classic of its kind. |
Barbara Trapido Lydia is killed in a car accident, but she returns to her bereft sister as a benign ghost who, nonetheless, comes to haunt the lives of those around her in... | Mary McCarthy; Candace Bushnell The original SEX AND THE CITY. First published in 1963, THE GROUP, set in the 1930s, follows the lives of eight college friends as they begin their adult lives. 'A... |
Alan Warner The choir from Our Lady of Perpetual Succour School for Girls is being bussed to the national finals in the big, big city. And it's an important day for The... | Alison Lurie A Pulitzer Prize-winning story which is both a comedy and a poignant love story about two American academics in London. The separate paths of these two lonely and naive innocents... |
Tom Wolfe Charlotte Simmons, a sheltered freshman from Sparta, North Carolina, is on a full scholarship. She learns that for the upper-crust coeds of Dupont, sex, Cool, and kegs trump academic achievement... | Tobias Wolff A novel from an American writer. |