Eight campus novels set in grad school

K.D. Walker is a Turkish and Creole writer born and raised in Los Angeles. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from Pomona College and is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Notre Dame. Her writing has been published or is forthcoming in Electric Literature, Cultbytes, the Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. In 2023, she was selected as a Tin House Summer Workshop Scholar and a Periplus Collective Fellow.

At Electric Lit she tagged eight novels that "promise to immerse you in the esoteric bubble of graduate programs, the 'dark academia' mood, and that hazy, never-ending desire for 'purpose,'” including:

Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

Yaa Gyasi’s second novel, Transcendent Kingdom, follows a family of Ghanaian immigrants while focusing on Gifty, the narrator in her fifth year of graduate school, studying Neuroscience at the Stanford School of Medicine. Gifty specifically researches the neural patterns of reward-seeking mice with the hopes of unlocking a secret cure to both addiction and depression. After her brother, Nana, passes away from an overdose and her mother retreats to Gifty’s bed in bouts of suicidal thoughts, Gifty retreats into her studies and searches endlessly for answers. This is a novel that can be read, or it can be experienced—through spiritual and religious exploration, scientific explanation, and the overarching goal of transformation, Gyasi outdoes herself yet again with a phenomenal 264 pages of intellectual expansion.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Transcendent Kingdom is among Matt Rowland Hill's top to books about losing faith and Blake Sanz's seven top books about immigrants encountering the American South.

--Marshal Zeringue