This year marks 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 in preparation for The Resemblance release next month, I’m counting down 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. Check in tomorrow to see what campus novel starts our list! #darkacademia #campusnovel #thesecrethistory #theresemblance