Twenty Favorite Campus Novels
(I’ve included novels set on either college campuses or boarding schools, and arranged them alphabetically by author.)
Sober
All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost by Lan Samantha Chang
A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood
Sweet Days of Discipline by Fleur Jaeggy
The Folded Leaf by William Maxwell
Stoner by John Williams
Comic
White Noise by Don DeLillo
Welcome to Braggsville by T. Geronimo Johnson
Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov
Straight Man by Richard Russo
Dear Committee Members by Julie Schumacher
Criminal
Dare Me by Megan Abbott
The Virgins by Pamela Erens
The Secret Place by Tana French
Borderliners by Peter Høeg
The Horned Man by James Lasdun
Fantastic
Vita Nostra by Maryna and Serhiy Dyachenko
Charlotte Sometimes by Penelope Farmer
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
As She Climbed Across the Table by Jonathan Lethem
The Secret Commonwealth by Philip Pullman
— February 10, 2021