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.