Last year marked the thirtieth anniversary of Donna Tartt’s much-loved cerebral campus mystery The Secret History. Although she wasn’t the first to choose a college campus as a mystery setting (Dorothy Sayers’s Gaudy Night [1935] and Helen Eustis’s The Horizontal Man [1947] are two early examples), her tale of violence and the strained friendships that emerge within an insular group of overly-enthusiastic Classics’ students has influenced a slew of campus novels since. The last ten years alone have seen such an overwhelming number of novels with academic settings that I’ve limited this list to my favorite campus novels of the past decade.
The Irish novelist and Booker Prize winner John Banville said: “All campus novels are, at a certain level, acts of revenge—on institutions, on colleagues, on students, even on set texts.” There’s certainly something Dickensian about the college experience. Even those who look back with a level of fond nostalgia must admit that it was the best of times and the worst. That amid pleasant memories of football games, meeting new people, and celebrating late nights with friends, there were miserable ones, too—the stress of cramming for exams, failing, heartbreak, and a myriad of other character-building but difficult life events that arise during those four years.
In the following titles, we’ll see institutions failing their most vulnerable members, colleagues terrorizing one another, students forming friendships only to destroy them, and renowned texts inspiring violence and ruin. And yet we’ll also find that the return to school promises cozy wool sweaters, leaves burning red, and students hunkering down in cozy nooks with books and hot coffee. There will be strangely intimate friendships solidified in campus housing, the joy of new and continued self-exploration, students falling headfirst into love and their academic studies, and all the well-tread labyrinth corridors and stone cloisters of some of the world’s most revered institutions.
25. The Idiot (2020) by Elif Batuman
In some ways, The Idiot by Elif Batuman seems like the most campus of campus novels, so it’s the perfect one to begin our list, if for no other reason than that for the first half of the book, you feel like you are going to college with the novel’s socially-clueless narrator Selin. You travel with her as she decorates her dorm room, goes to class, and meets her roommates with all their idiosyncrasies; then you witness her discover her first friend, soak in Fellini movies, and try to understand the nuances of romantic relationships.
Selin’s voyage through the often-confusing terrain of young adulthood takes her first to Harvard, then to Paris and Hungary and finally to the birthplace of her ancestors in Turkey. Her extracurricular travel means not all of the novel takes place on a college campus but enough time is spent at Harvard that I think it safely qualifies. Selin’s often bewildered by the world around her, fascinated by people with opinions, inept at small talk, and unprepared for the chances she takes. At the same, she analyzes Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment and wonders at the importance of a story that justifies a man sacrificing an old woman to enable his own intellectual development. She puzzles over the internally inconsistent world of Stoker’s Dracula. Fascinated by language, she prefers the written word to the spoken one, and yet ultimately is not sure she understands anything at all.
In grad school, I always felt like the more I learned, the more I realized how much more there was to know. It’s a cyclical feeling, and yet—that’s what I loved about it—the expanding world view, challenges to preconceived notions, and exposure to people of different backgrounds with different opinions and experiences. Selin is by no means the idiot the title suggests, but she certainly has a lot more to learn.
✔️ Intellectually-rigorous Harvard setting
✔️ Coming of age story
24. Transcendent Kingdom (2020) by Yaa Gyasi
Set at Stanford, Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom contains the only west coast campus on our list. Gifty is a PhD candidate studying the neuroscience of addiction and depression. She spends hours observing mice addicted to the nutritional drink Ensure in order to understand the different patterns of reward seeking behavior. The lab at the School of Medicine is as far as possible from rural Alabama, where she grew up attending an evangelical church with her Ghana-immigrant mother and brother. But her research is personal on two levels: her brother, Nana, was prescribed OxyContin after an ankle injury, struggled with addiction, and died of a heroin overdose before he graduated from high school. The Alabama church, whose congregation praised Nana’s basketball abilities and treated him like a minor celebrity before his injury, whispered about their family, the white members convinced “their kind” had a taste for drugs and never suspecting that one of their own white youth group members was dealing. And yet when after Nana’s death, Gifty’s mother sinks into a deep depression, it’s the pastor, whom she calls for help. Even as a child, she’s confused by the church’s judgement on one hand and words of comfort on the other. It mirrors the questioning way her child-self would poke holes in Bible stories: how long did Lazarus live after he was raised from the dead? Was he among us even today–an ancient vampire? How to reconcile religion with science? Creationism with evolution? Sixteen years later, she’s still struggling with these questions. And when her mother slips into another deep depression and the pastor puts her on a plane to come stay with Gifty while she completes her PhD, Gifty will have to confront the past. Torn between science and faith, unanswered prayers and the promise of salvation, Gifty must learn to trust, to let other people in, and ask for help.
✔️ Set at a prestigious institution
✔️ Ambitious PhD candidate
✔️ A discipline re-defining discovery
✔️ Coming of age story
23. The Lying Game (2017) by Ruth Ware
Boarding schools, like exclusive liberal arts colleges, seem to be breeding grounds for all kinds of secrets and misdeeds. Combine an insular, seaside setting with tight-knit friendships and a dangerous game, and you’ll see why Ruth Ware’s The Lying Game makes the list.
Friends Kate, Fatima, Thea, and Isa leave their boarding school in disgrace. Rumors surrounding their departure abound—both among their classmates and the locals in the coastal village of Salten. The girls are already notorious for a game they liked to play as students, “the lying game.” It’s a simple game with only three rules: 1) Tell a lie. 2) Stick to your story. 3) And never, ever get caught. After school, the girls go their separate ways. But when a body is found in the Reech, a tidal estuary near Kate’s crumbling mill house, they find themselves revisiting their school years and the lies they told. Full of secrets, twists, and—as the title indicates—lies, The Lying Game is about the pasts that haunt us and the strength and limitations of friendships.
✔️ Insular northeastern boarding school setting
✔️ Tight-knit friend group turned tragedy
✔️ A return to campus unravels hidden secrets
22. Madam (2021) by Phoebe Wynne
Phoebe Wynne’s Madam offers another isolated boarding school setting. Here, we find Caldonbrae Hall, an ancestral castle rising high above a rocky Scottish cliffside where girls in high-necked white dresses and cropped gray blazers take classes like Value and Worship. Rose Christie is a new teacher and head of the Classics department. At 26, she feels too young to hold such a position at the prestigious institution. And yet, she soon discovers not all is as it appears. Her predecessor left under mysterious circumstances, and a girl haunts her steps insisting she doesn’t belong there.
Intermixed with feminist retellings of classic, self-sacrificing heroines like Antigone, Dido, and Lucretia, Madam highlights the dark motives behind limiting a woman’s education and the courage of those who fight to control their own destinies.
✔️ Insular boarding school setting
✔️ Violent interpretations of classical mythology
✔️ Mysterious group with dangerous secrets
✔️ Salacious behavior of esteemed faculty
✔️ Critical look at our most-prized institutions
✔️ Tight-knit friend group turned tragedy
21. The Maidens (2021) by Alex Michaelides
In the follow up to his New York Times bestseller debut The Silent Patient, Alex Michaelides brings his talent for crafting twisty plots and characters to Cambridge in The Maidens. Set beneath the university’s heavy-limbed trees and stone archways, the novel combines a charismatic professor with a mysterious group of beautiful female students, prophetically known as the “Maidens.” Like in Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, classical mythology plays a key role in the plot and the violence within.
Group psychotherapist Mariana is still grieving her late husband when she receives a call from her niece, Zoe, to come to Cambridge. One of Zoe’s friends has been violently murdered, and she suspects her tutor, the charismatic Professor Edward Fosca, is involved. The ending will leave you reeling, thinking back over the entire novel, looking for clues.
✔️ Cozy, bookish Cambridge setting
✔️ An unhealthy interest in the Classics
✔️ Characters driven by ego, obsession, and passion
✔️ Coming of age story
✔️ Violent interpretations of a classical myth (Demeter and Persephone)
✔️ Students enamored with a magnetic and manipulative authority figure
✔️ Mysterious group with dangerous secrets
✔️ Salacious behavior of esteemed faculty
20. The Latinist (2022) by Mark Prins
As a recovering academic, I have to say that Mark Prins’s debut, The Latinist, brought me back to the self-induced stress of my Ph.D. years (all those conference presentations, studying for qualifying exams, preparing for the dissertation defense), and I found myself fully invested in the success of doctoral candidate Tessa Templeton as she fought to make her mark on her field and secure an increasingly-elusive professor position.
Tessa Templeton is struggling. Her position as the favorite of the esteemed Oxford classics professor, Christopher Eccles, hasn’t helped with her job search, and instead, her obsession with her work has resulted in a break up with her boyfriend, Ben. When someone tips her off that Eccles’s letter of recommendation does not contain the glowing review of her character and work ethic she expected, Tessa scrambles to uncover the truth; and makes an important discovery in the process—one that could launch her career, so long as no one else takes credit.
✔️ Cozy, bookish Oxford setting
✔️ Famed Classics professor
✔️ Ambitious PhD candidate
✔️ A discipline re-defining discovery
✔️ Characters driven by ego, obsession, and passion
✔️ Violent interpretations of a classical myth (Daphne and Apollo)
✔️ Salacious behavior of esteemed faculty
19. Catherine House (2020) by Elizabeth Thomas
Set in a crumbling mansion in the woods of rural Pennsylvania, Catherine House takes the isolation of campus levels to a whole new level. Not exactly a college, the exclusive Catherine House is a post-secondary institution with an ivy-league sized endowment, where students smart enough to be accepted can attend without paying tuition. But the school’s generosity comes at a cost: in exchange, students must leave everything behind and commit three years of their lives to the house while eschewing any contact to the outside world.
Ines arrives to campus with her own secrets, but she’s determined to uncover the clandestine activities of the house’s inhabitants, most notably the experiments with a mysterious substance called plasma. Catherine House has all the drunken parties, tight-knit friend groups, and decadent settings of many campus novels of the list, but also has a speculative element with hidden labs, special keycards, and a force that connects human minds and bodies with the world.
And, as an extra bonus, Ines chooses German as her language of study due to her focus on art history. She thinks it’s hard but likes it more than her other classes. As a former German professor, I loved how she described the language as less impenetrable than other subjects, because German has rules: “And in the merry, cartoon colored world of our textbook, everything was simple. There was a family with a mother, father, son, daughter, and cat. The family lived in a big house. The parents loved the children. The children loved the cat. The cat said miau.”
✔️ Insular boarding school setting
✔️ Coming of age story
✔️ Mysterious group with dangerous secrets
✔️ Students enamored with a manipulative authority figure
✔️ Tight-knit cohort drama
18. The Incendiaries (2018) by R.O. Kwon
There’s something special about those college years: late teens to early twenties, you’re figuring out who you are, what you want to do, and exploring all those questions about identity and purpose while surrounded by other people your age asking the same things.
That’s where we find Phoebe Lin and Will Kendall in The Incendiaries. Both are studying at an elite American university, but come from very different backgrounds. Phoebe has a magnetic personality, doesn’t worry about money, and spends most of her time partying with friends. Yet she’s unhappy and plagued by a guilt stemming from her mother’s recent death. Will is a scholarship kid and transfer student, who waits tables to send money back to a mother struggling with mental health. Despite their differences, Will loves Phoebe, but she’s drawn to the enigmatic John Leal, a self-proclaimed escapee from North Korea and leader of a secretive, cult-like religious group. After the bombing of several abortion clinics, and one which kills five young girls, Phoebe disappears, and Will believes John Leal is to blame. The Incendiaries is a mesmerizing, strange, and powerful book about love, belief, and the vulnerability of grief.
✔️ Small, northeastern liberal arts campus setting
✔️ Cozy, bookish Oxford setting
✔️ Characters driven by ego, obsession, and passion
✔️ Coming of age story
✔️ Students enamored with a magnetic and manipulative authority figure
✔️ Mysterious group with dangerous secrets
✔️ Tight-knit friend group turned tragedy
✔️ Students obsessed with each other
17. Vladimir (2022) by Julia May Jonas
It seems most campus novels focus on relationships between students, so Julia May Jonas’s Vladimir with its shocking portrayal of a faculty-couple’s extracurricular affairs offers a nice alternative. As anyone who has seen HBO’s The Chair (or has had the dubious pleasure of sitting in department meeting themselves) knows, academic departments are rife with the same petty jealousies and competitiveness one finds between students—except these relationships are all the more fraught for their much longer history (consider some faculty have worked together for thirty-plus years).
Vladimir begins with a scandal. John, the unnamed narrator’s husband, has been placed on leave after being accused of sexual misconduct by several women, including a number of his former students at the small New York liberal arts college both he and his wife teach at. The narrator is aware of her husband’s behavior (they’ve long had an open marriage), and her refusal to play the part of the betrayed wife earns her the scorn of not only her adult daughter, but also her students and colleagues. She, however, has other concerns on her mind: namely the increasingly-sexual fantasies surrounding her new colleague: Vladimir. The story gets crazier and crazier, but the narrator’s campus-life commentary and erotic fantasies had me laughing out loud and cringing at the same time. If you like exploring the faculty-side of campus novels, some earlier examples include Alison Lurie’s The War Between the Tates (1974), A. S. Byatt’s Possession (1990). Philip Roth’s The Human Stain (2000), and Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (2005).
✔️ Small, northeastern liberal arts campus setting
✔️ Characters driven by ego, obsession, and passion
✔️ Salacious behavior of esteemed faculty
✔️ Critical look at our most-prized institutions
16. The It Girl (2022) by Ruth Ware
When Hannah Jones arrives at Oxford, she’s surprised to find she has a roommate. Bright and vivacious, April Coutts-Cliveden is an “it girl” and, like Sloan Sullivan of Laurie Elizabeth Flynn’s The Girls Are All So Nice Here, loves vicious pranks. Here, we find an example of an inseparable group of friends—the confident and handsome Will, the bumbling but brilliant Hugh, headstrong but sensitive Ryan, and the smart but aloof Emily, who will ultimately be divided by an untimely death: At the end of their second term, April is murdered; and Hannah discovers her body shortly after seeing the school porter leaving their room.
Ten years later, Hannah is pregnant with Will’s child and the Oxford porter who was convicted of April’s murder has died in prison. But the news of his death brings renewed attention to the case and when a journalist suggests the porter may have been innocent, Hannah realizes she may have condemned an innocent man to prison and allowed April’s murderer to walk free.
✔️ Cozy, bookish Oxford setting
✔️ Tight-knit friend group turned tragedy
✔️ Students obsessed with each other
✔️ A return to campus unravels hidden secrets
15. True Biz (2022) by Sara Nović
True Biz is set at River Valley School, a boarding school for Deaf students. The headmistress, February, the hearing daughter of deaf parents, works long hours to support students who are often misunderstood by their own parents and is trying to keep the school open amid budgets, care for a mother with dementia, and save her marriage. Charlie is a new student, determined to catch up after years of wearing a faulty cochlear implant. Where Charlie’s never met a Deaf person before, Austin comes from a Deaf family and holds an almost celebrity-like status in the Deaf community. And then there’s his roommate Eliot, who arrives on campus with a scar running down the side of his face. When the three students go missing, February will have to consider their individual histories as she retraces their tracks.
True Biz, like many coming-of-age stories, is one of young love and self-discovery, but it also highlights the effects of the cochlear implant on Deaf education, the lack of support by state legislation, and the economic impacts on care, therapy, and educational resources, alongside the history of sign language, ableism, oralism, and political activism. Throughout the novel, ASL illustrations are provided; and the title “True Biz” is figurative ASL for “really, seriously, definitely, real-talk.”
✔️ Boarding school setting
✔️ Tight-knit cohort drama
✔️ Coming of age story
14. For Your Own Good (2021) by Samantha Downing
Set at the fictional Belmont Academy, Samantha Downing’s For Your Own Good is another private-school campus novel, and this one is especially devious, complete with meddling parents, overworked students, and one dangerously psychotic teacher.
Teacher of the Year Teddy Crutcher just wants the best for Belmont Academy. He may have unconventional methods, like requiring students to drop their cell phones in a box by his door and adding little pick-me-ups to his co-workers’ coffee, but it’s all done in the service of the school. And if Mr. Crutcher gives a student a B- when they deserve an A, or writes a letter of recommendation asserting a student has cheated when they have not, it’s not simply because he thinks they’re arrogant and entitled—he’s doing it to teach them a lesson. And he has quite a number of lessons to teach following several mysterious deaths on Belmont’s campus and the arrest of two of his students.
✔️ Prestigious private school setting
✔️ Characters driven by ego, obsession, and passion
✔️ Salacious behavior of esteemed faculty
13. Real Life (2020) by Brandon Taylor
Longlisted for the Booker Prize, Real Life by Brandon Taylor is the only campus novel on this list to take place in the Midwest and the only one to feature a Black, gay graduate student as its narrator—making it simultaneously the most original campus novel on the list and an incisive critique of the genre from within.
Real Life follows Wallace, a biochemistry Ph.D. student at a Midwestern university, as he navigates conflicting emotions regarding his father’s recent death, a new romantic relationship with a straight friend, a lab mate who may be sabotaging his research, and the increasing tensions within his white cohort. Taylor, who began writing the novel while he himself was a grad student studying biochemistry, is an avid reader of novels with academic setting and noticed an absence of the queer black experience in campus fiction. He told The New York Times: “What I wanted to do was to take this genre and this milieu that I really respond to as a reader and to sort of write myself into it.” Real Life is a much-needed addition to the campus novel genre.
✔️ Midwestern university setting
✔️ PhD candidate
✔️ Characters driven by ego, obsession, and passion
✔️ Critical look at our most-prized institutions
✔️ Tight-knit cohort drama
12. All’s Well (2022) by Mona Awad
Set at a northeastern college, Mona Awad’s All’s Well depicts the quickly unravelling life of theater professor Miranda Fitch. After falling off the stage, Miranda suffers chronic back and hip pain, loses her marriage, and develops an addition to painkillers. We discover her at the beginning of performance season with a group of mutinous students set on performing Macbeth contrary to Miranda’s wishes, who wants to relive her glory days through a staging of All’s Well That Ends Well. But mysterious circumstances grant Miranda her wish: her pain is removed, a donation to the theater department enables her choice play, and even the handsome stage designer, Hugo, begins to pay her attention. Absent of pain, Miranda is euphoric, determined to experience all the pleasures denied her for so long, no matter that her healing seems to have come at the expense of another person. I appreciated how Awad refuses the common narrative that suffering makes for a better person. Instead, she explores pain’s all-consuming nature, the selfishness that can develop as a result of it, and the desire to live without pain at all costs. Complete with “golden remedy” cocktails, mysterious benefactors, and magical baths, All’s Well is one of the most surprising books I’ve read in a while—told in the fever-dream that is Miranda’s narration, anything seemed possible. This one’s for you if you like campus novels that focus on faculty members behaving badly and all the behind-the-curtain drama of theater productions.
✔️ Small, northeastern liberal arts campus setting
✔️ Characters driven by ego, obsession, and passion
✔️ Salacious behavior of esteemed faculty
11. The Last Housewife (2022) by Ashley Winstead
Only about a quarter of Ashley Winstead’s The Last Housewife takes place on a college campus but the events there are so integral to the plot and the story itself checks so many campus novel boxes, I felt confident including it in this list.
The traumatic first meeting of Shay Deroy, Laurel Hargrove, and Clementine Jones the morning after a house party on their New York college campus forms the basis of what should be a lifelong friendship. But by senior year, only Laurel and Shay remain, and eight years later, Shay learns of Laurel’s death from her favorite true crime podcast.
The similarities between Clem and Laurel’s deaths shake Shay from her curated suburban home and have her joining forces with the podcast host to revisit the life she left behind, one where wealth and male privilege empower violence and hinder justice in an approximation of social order that is as repulsive and disturbing as it is familiar. A dark, propulsive thriller that asks what it means to have control: of ourselves, our desires, and other people.
✔️ Small, northeastern liberal arts campus setting
✔️ Characters driven by ego, obsession, and passion
✔️ Coming of age story
✔️ Students enamored with a magnetic and manipulative authority figure
✔️ Mysterious group with dangerous secrets
✔️ Tight-knit friend group turned tragedy
✔️ A return to campus unravels hidden secrets
10. Ordinary Monsters (2022) by J. M. Miro
Like Elif Bautman’s The Idiot, this novel doesn’t take place entirely on campus but there’s enough activity set within the boarding school Cairndale that I think Ordinary Monsters can qualify as a campus novel; and its original and atmospheric setting is perfect for anyone who loves schools for magical misfits like J.K. Rowling’s Hogwarts or Lev Grossman’s Brakebills.
Campus novels often take readers on a journey of discovery, and here we venture into the known and unknown, the misunderstood and the feared, in a quest for purpose and belonging. A well-researched work of historical fantasy, the book takes place in 1882—spanning Victorian London, post-reconstruction Mississippi, Meiji-era Tokyo, and a sprawling boarding-school-style estate near Edinburgh—and follows two children with unusual Talents who are hunted by a man made of smoke. You’ll fall in love with the characters: the glowing boy twice abandoned, the sixteen-year-old whose ability to heal himself makes him a subject of fear and casual torment, the sisters hiding backstage in the wooden theaters of Tokyo, the female detective without Talents, and even the man of smoke, himself.
✔️ Insular (northeastern) boarding school setting
✔️ Characters driven by ego, obsession, and passion
✔️ Coming of age story
✔️ Mysterious group with dangerous secrets
9. My Education (2013) by Susan Choi
Set at a prestigious university somewhere in the northeast, My Education by Susan Choi is the fourth novel on this list that takes a graduate student as its focus. Here, we discover Regina Gottlieb in the second week of her first year in grad school already intrigued by the pomade-slick, duster-wearing English professor Nicholas Brodeur. He’s rumored to ask female students to read poetry to him while he lies on his office floor, to recite couplets while staring at his students’ breasts, and to be an avid fan of Roman Polanski. He’s also the most attractive man Regina’s ever seen. But it is his wife, Martha, also a member of the faculty, a new mother, and renowned home-chef, whose tempestuous and beguiling nature captivates Regina. It’s a story of love, marriage, naivety, and obsession set against the backdrop of grading papers and graduate school seminars, complex roommate relationships, and self-discovery.
✔️ Small, northeastern liberal arts campus setting
✔️ Ambitious PhD candidate
✔️ Characters driven by ego, obsession, and passion
✔️ Coming of age story
✔️ Salacious behavior of esteemed faculty
8. My Dark Vanessa (2020) by Kate Elizabeth Russell
Another boarding school novel, Kate Elizabeth Russell’s My Dark Vanessa is rich with the color of fall leaves and cozy nooks of the school’s historic campus. And yet this seemingly safe and isolated community is the same setting for the protagonist’s grooming experience and sexual assault. It’s this juxtaposition—that those entrusted with a young person’s care and intellectual development can do them harm—as well as the other contradictions Russell introduces in the text—the young girl who doesn’t consider herself a victim, the woman who comes forward and is labeled a liar and life-ruiner, the woman who doesn’t and is labeled as selfish and enabling—that make this novel so timely and troubling
Told in interwoven timelines, My Dark Vanessa is the story of fifteen-year-old Vanessa Wye who is groomed by her 42-year-old English teacher at a fictional northeastern boarding school, and twenty-two-year-old Vanessa seven years later as she struggles to deal with the misconduct accusations of another young woman against the same teacher. It’s a story that rings all too familiar, and leaves more questions than answers: questions about agency, consent, and labels. Questions about expectations of survivors in a #Me-too era, self-preservation, and social responsibility.
✔️ Cozy boarding school setting
✔️ Coming of age story
✔️ Students enamored with a magnetic and manipulative authority figure
✔️ Salacious behavior of esteemed faculty
✔️ Critical look at our most-prized institutions
7. The Year of the Gadfly (2012) by Jennifer Miller
Jennifer Miller’s The Year of the Gadfly is set at a Mariana Academy, a private school nestled between nameless mountains in the small northeastern town of Nye. Like so many campuses on this list, Mariana has a troubled past and its own secret society: Prisom’s Party, an anonymous group that claims to uphold the moral code of the school founder by exposing the misdeeds of students and faculty alike through its paper “The Devil’s Advocate.”
Alternating between the perspectives of Iris Dupont, the brief-case-toting freshman who’s been sent to the school after she’s discovered having conversations with her “spiritual mentor, the nationally-renowned, deceased journalist Edward R. Murrow; Jonah Kaplan, the PhD-holding entomologist who recently joined the faculty despite his troubled history as a student, and Lily Morrow, the albino daughter of the headmaster struggling to fit in years before Iris arrives and moves into the same bedroom, The Year of the Gadfly is a coming-of-age novel where common misunderstandings of youth and its occasional cruelty have tragic consequences, and one bright and eccentric freshman is determined to discover what happened to the school’s former students.
✔️ Insular private school setting
✔️ Characters driven by ego, obsession, and passion
✔️ Coming of age story
✔️ Students enamored with a magnetic and manipulative authority figure
✔️ Mysterious group with dangerous secrets
✔️ Salacious behavior of esteemed faculty
✔️ Critical look at our most-prized institutions
✔️ Tight-knit friend group turned tragedy
✔️ A return to campus unravels hidden secrets
✔️ Students obsessed with each other
6. The Girls Are All So Nice Here (2021) by Laurie Elizabeth Flynn
“We need to talk about what we did that night.”
One of my favorite tropes of the dark academia genre is the friends-gone-wrong scenario. In The Girls Are All So Nice Here, the motivated, but out-of-place Ambrosia “Amb” Wellington immediately becomes enamored with the popular Sloane Sullivan during their freshman year at Wesleyan; but Sloane likes playing manipulative games that target other girls; and as Amb tries to impress her, their actions become particularly cruel when Sloane turns her attention to Amb’s sweet and unsuspecting roommate Flora. Ten years later, Amb only attends her college reunion to avoid telling her husband why she doesn’t want to go, but someone is out for revenge, and the malicious behavior Amb thought she’d left in the past may finally catch up with her.
✔️ Small, northeastern liberal arts campus setting
✔️ Tight-knit friend group turned tragedy
✔️ Students obsessed with each other
✔️ A return to campus unravels hidden secrets
5. Black Chalk (2013) by Christopher J. Yates
In another campus novel set at Oxford, six friends play a game of dares and consequences. As the game continues, the consequences grow more personal and more humiliating. And what starts as silly pranks or embarrassing outfit choices soon becomes a vicious fight that only the cruelest among them can win and one will not survive. But who’s truly pulling the strings? And what will happen fourteen years later when the last contestants meet for the final round?
Puzzles and mnemonic devices, games within games, friends preying on one another’s weaknesses—I found myself shifting allegiances over the course of the novel and then wishing the central characters would just quit playing so they could return to being friends. But reading was like pulling out pieces from a puzzle box, watching them shift and slide into place, only for another puzzle to come tumbling out. Black Chalk is one of those thoroughly enjoyable campus novel-dark academia hybrids with all the bell towers, underground stone bars, cozy tête-à-têtes, and quick-witted conversations a true fan of the genre could want.
✔️ Cozy, bookish Oxford setting
✔️ Characters driven by ego, obsession, and passion
✔️ Mysterious group with dangerous secrets
✔️ Salacious behavior of esteemed faculty
✔️ Students obsessed with each other
✔️ Tight-knit friend group turned tragedy
4. In My Dreams I Hold a Knife (2021) by Ashely Winstead
The second dark academia novel by Ashley Winstead on this list, In My Dreams I Hold a Knife features a tight-knit friend group with secrets so notorious their group even has a name: the East House Seven. Their friendship is forged on homecoming, when they steal a rival house’s parade float, set off fireworks, and streak through the parade. Jessica, Heather, Jack, Mint, Caro, Frankie, and Coop are friends throughout college until tragedy rocks their senior year. Ten years later, the group has fractured. One is dead. Another accused of murder. But the real murderer walks free. When the remaining five are invited back to campus homecoming weekend, they’re forced to confront their worst secrets and find out what really happened that night.
Set at the fictional elite Duquette University, this campus novel deserves an additional mention, because it’s one of the few that take place in the American south.
✔️ Southern university setting
✔️ Characters driven by ego, obsession, and passion
✔️ Tight-knit friend group turned tragedy
✔️ Students obsessed with each other
✔️ A return to campus unravels hidden secrets
3. If We Were Villains (2017) by M. L. Rio
Ten years after Oliver Marks goes to jail for the murder of one of his classmates, he’s ready to tell the truth about what happened his fourth year at Dellecher Classical Conservatory, where he and his friends immersed themselves in performances of Shakespeare, bacchanal parties, and struggled with the boundaries between life and art. Those cast as the heroes at the beginning of the school year soon find themselves the villains, the key players become mere sidekicks; and as the balance in power shifts, their world spirals out of control leaving one dead and the rest to give the most important performance of their lives: convincing the police they’re innocent of murder. This book checks so many boxes of what I love about campus novels: changing leaves, chilly castle-like rooms full of leather-bound books, well-tended fireplaces, and an isolated setting that lends an anything-goes attitude, exasperates already high competitive tensions, and propels a tight-knit friend group into self-destruction.
✔️ Insular northeastern campus setting
✔️ Characters driven by ego, obsession, and passion
✔️ Students obsessed with each other
✔️ Tight-knit friend group turned tragedy
2. The Likeness (2008) & The Secret Place (2014) by Tana French
I’m cheating a little bit here, but I’m going to use The Secret Place by Tana French as an excuse to squeeze in one of my favorite campus novels, French’s second novel, The Likeness, even though it doesn’t fall within the ten years’ rule.
The Likeness is the second book in Tana French’s Dublin Murder Series. Detective Cassie Maddox has transferred out of the murder squad after the events in book one and is working in the domestic violence unit when she receives a call out to a crime scene in the Irish countryside. The invitation is strange, considering she no longer works homicide, and becomes even stranger when she sees the victim wears her face and has the ID of Lexi Madison, an alter-ego she and Detective Frank Mackey invented years earlier when she went undercover as a college student. Now Frank wants her to go undercover again—this time joining the strangely elusive group of graduate students in the crime-scene adjacent manor house. What I love about this novel is the relationship between the students themselves—the handsome and stoic Daniel, the sweet and nervous Justin, the brash but sensitive Rafe, the smart and caring Abby, and lastly the spirited but elusive Lexi—and the countryside estate belonging to Daniel’s uncle, which they so lovingly restore together. Given the friend dynamic and the murder of one of their own, of all the books on the list, this would be the nearest comp for The Secret History fans.
The Secret Place is the fifth book in the Dublin Murder Squad, and sees the return of Frank Mackey, the larger-than-life detective who put Cassie on her first murder case and assigned her to investigate that charming groups of friends in The Likeness. In this quinary installment of my favorite detective series, Frank’s daughter, Holly, attends a girls’ boarding school where a boy was found murdered on the grounds the previous year. The case was never solved, so Detective Stephen Moran is surprised to find Holly in his office with a photo of the boy and the words “I know who killed him” written beneath. Stephen sees this as an opportunity to transition from the less-prestigious cold cases into Dublin’s murder squad, and joins with Detective Antoinette Conway as she reopens the case. The investigation leads them back to Holly’s close-knit friend group and adolescent cloistered world, where sneaking out is more than just an exercise in rebellion and friends will do anything to protect their own.
✔️ Cozy boarding school or university setting
✔️ Coming of age story
✔️ Students obsessed with each other
✔️ Tight-knit friend group turned tragedy
1. The Secret History (1992) by Donna Tartt
And now we’ve counted down to the one that started them all thirty years ago. The Secret History may very well be an act of revenge like John Banville asserted in his introduction to Javier Marías’s All Souls. In her podcast, Once Upon a Time at Bennington College, Lili Anolik examines the twisted friendships and complicated rivalries that inspired its author alums: Bret Easton Ellis, writer of American Psycho, Jonathan Lethem, of Motherless Brooklyn; and Donna Tartt, herself.
When Richard is accepted to Hampden College, an elite Vermont institution, he sees it as an opportunity to escape his impoverished circumstances and make a fresh start. He’s immediately enamored with a group of five students enrolled in a highly-selective Ancient Greek course taught by the independently wealthy and eccentric Classics’ professor Julian Morrow. Although initially denied class entry, Richard’s accepted into the exclusive group after solving a grammar dispute. We know from the beginning that one of the friends has been murdered and the rest are to blame, so the mystery is less of a who-done-it but why. And it’s the “why” that leads the novel into its fascinating study of social dynamics and the human condition.
Like The Likeness, much of the appeal lies in the relationships between the characters themselves: Richard Papen, the narrator on scholarship who longs for the picturesque and whose desire to belong is recognizable from so many other campus novels on this list; Bunny Corcoran, the entitled, egotistical racist, whose perhaps only sympathetic quality is that he’s murdered by his friends; the self-absorbed and aloof Henry Winter, the most intelligent of the group; Francis Abernathy with his feelings for Charles and whose country home access enables some of the group’s more nefarious misdeeds; and the twins, Charles and Camilla Macauley, whose fair-hair and extremely close relationship make them particularly elusive.