Remember campus life? The students, the professors, the politics, the shenanigans… Go back to school with these 5 must-read novels set in colleges and universities.

1. Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis

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“A hilarious satire about college life and high class manners, this is a classic of postwar English literature.”

2. Changing Places by David Lodge

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“Changing Places is a hilarious send-up of academic life, intellectual fashion, sex, and marriage by a writer Anthony Burgess has called ‘one of the best novelists of his generation.'”

3. Nevergreen by Andrew Pessin

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“A smart, fast, funny, and incisive portrait of today’s liberal arts college scene, cancel culture—and more.”

4. The Secret History by Donna Tartt

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“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 world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality their lives are changed profoundly and forever, and they discover how hard it can be to truly live and how easy it is to kill.”

5. The Human Stain by Philip Roth

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“It is 1998, the year in which America is whipped into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small New England town, an aging classics professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist. The charge is a lie, but the real truth about Silk would have astonished even his most virulent accuser.”

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