As the academic calendar reasserts itself and the quality of light shifts almost overnight, the campus novels to read this September arrange themselves into something like a syllabus of their own, one that runs, usefully, from the Gothic to the grimly contemporary.
The five titles below span three decades of university fiction. What connects them is less the physical campus than a shared preoccupation: what institutions do to the people inside them, and what those people do to each other.
The classics of the form: Tartt, Batuman and the novels that defined the genre
Any serious list starts with Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (1992), still widely credited with inaugurating what has since been labelled the ‘dark academia’ genre. Richard Papen, narrating at a distance of years, recalls his time at an elite liberal arts college in Vermont, his slow admission to an exclusive Classics seminar run by the eccentric Julian Morris, and the double murder that emerges from the group’s Gothic entanglements. The snowy, architecturally imposing world Tartt constructs has shaped, perhaps more than any other single novel, how the American college experience is imagined from the outside, and the cult following it has accumulated shows little sign of dissipating, nearly 35 years on.
At the other end of the tonal register sits Elif Batuman’s The Idiot (2017), set in Harvard in the 1990s. Selin, a linguistics student with a particular interest in Russian, begins a correspondence with Ivan, a Hungarian classmate, that grows far more intense in her imagination than it apparently does in his. A summer that takes her to Paris and then to Hungary, where she has accepted a short-term teaching position, partly to be nearer to him, allows Batuman to anatomise, in close and often comic detail, the peculiarly overwhelming experience of being young and suddenly exposed to new languages, places and desires. The title is a deliberate nod to Dostoevsky. In 2022, Batuman extended Selin’s story in the sequel Either/Or, sustaining the same quality of micro-observation.
More campus novels to read: the contemporary and the critical
Shola von Reinhold’s Lote (2020) begins in London, with a researcher named Mathilda Adaramola pursuing what she calls “Transfixions”, Black, queer, trans and femme figures largely erased from historical memory, particularly those connected to the 1920s Bright Young Things. Discovering a photograph of the fictional Black Scottish poet Hermia Druitt in an uncatalogued collection at the National Portrait Gallery, she follows the trail to a mysterious residency in a small European town. The tensions that accumulate there echo, knowingly, the claustrophobic social dynamics of The Secret History, while remaining entirely their own. Lote is a novel about archival pleasure and archival exclusion simultaneously, about who gets to be remembered, and by whom.
Julia May Jonas’s Vladimir (2022) opens with a line that earns its provocation: ‘When I was a child, I loved old men, and I could also tell that they loved me.’ The unnamed narrator, an English Literature professor, is managing her husband’s exposure to student complaints about inappropriate conduct while nursing her own fixation on a younger colleague. Her private arrangement (an agreed open relationship) has been pulled into the institutional light by his alleged behaviour. Jonas lets the discomfort sit without resolution, and readers inclined toward a theoretical companion might follow the novel with Amia Srinivasan’s essay collection The Right to Sex, which traverses adjacent terrain. Vladimir has since been adapted as a Netflix series starring Rachel Weisz and Leo Woodall.
The most pointed of the five is Maria Adelmann’s The Adjunct (2026), which treats the campus not as a site of Gothic intrigue or intellectual romance but as a workplace structured by precarity. Sam takes an adjunct professorship at a liberal arts college near her home in Baltimore, discovering quickly that the role is simultaneously overworked and under-resourced. According to The Brooklyn Rail, Sam calculates she will face 2,000 pages of written work to grade, an institutional demand that sits alongside her being chained to student loan payments of $500 a month for more than two decades. Into this already pressured existence arrives her former PhD supervisor, who has a second novel forthcoming. Rumour has it the subject is the nature of his relationship with Sam herself, and her attempt to reclaim the narrative while economically disadvantaged gives the novel its particular friction. The Adjunct reads as the genre’s corrective impulse, the campus novel that declines to make the university look charming.
Taken together, the five campus novels to read this September form something more than a seasonal reading list. They constitute a kind of critical history of the genre, from the ur-text that invented its visual grammar to the novels now dismantling its assumptions from the inside.
