66 Campus Novels for Back-To-School Reading

"The college campus has been a popular setting for books since the days of ancient Greece. In fact, Aristotle once wrote a dark academic thriller—Bald-Faced Lyres—set at his lyceum circa 300 BCE.

We kid, we kid. But it's true that the campus novel is an interesting specimen that can cut across multiple genres. Here we've collected a class of relatively new books where most or all of the action takes place in a high school or college campus setting, just in time for back-to-school reading/procrastination! You'll also notice we've appended a footnote section at the bottom for Notable Alumni—three additional famous books with campus themes that we couldn't bear leaving off this list.

The recent dark academia resurgence is well-represented this year (check out The Cloisters, Babel, and Ordinary Monsters). And if that weren't harrowing enough, beleaguered graduate students appear to be a developing trend (Disorientation, The Latinist, Identitti)!"