The best campus novels in literature

Whatever your age, there's something timelessly appealing about novels set on university campuses. Maybe it has something to do with the endless possibilities of youth – a short, unjaded period in life that we all experienced, students or not, where the future stretched out like a giant question mark snaking into the distance.

Or is it to do with the fascinating perspective of university lecturers, stuck in a very special circle of hell that Dante forgot to mention – the one where you grow older in a world where almost everyone else stays beautiful and under 21?

It could just be the atmosphere of university that lends itself so well to fiction: a seething hotbed of life, ideas and human folly where professors sleep with students, and sometimes even each other; where students engage in more acts of recklessness than (probably) at any other time in their lives; and where academics fall out in (sometimes) the pettiest of ways.

Whatever the reason, we have been blessed with fictional universities from across the literary spectrum. And here – from coming-of-age narratives to satires of academic life and campus murder-mystery – are some of the best.