Five Back To School Books
Extra credit
Welcome to Five Books For, a newsletter for people who love great stories. I’m so happy you’re here.
This month, I thought it would be interesting to focus on something a little different: books that either explore the theme of education or use it as a key part of their setting. Whether it’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Malory Towers, Matilda or Harry Potter, schools (and indeed universities) have long been an evocative setting for writers. Schools give writers the gift of baked-in structure and hierarchy as well as tapping into an experience which most of us are familiar with in some form, whether we enjoyed it at the time or not.
From murder mysteries, memoir and a modern classic, via laugh out loud satire and a foray into fantasy, all of these five books have education in common despite their vast differences. As ever, I hope you find something great to read here.
Further reading
This month over at Global Comment, I watched Never Let Me Go, the movie adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s deeply moving and thoughtful novel, partly set in a residential school. I went into it with relatively low expectations but was blown away by how good it was. You can read more about it here.
This month’s edition of Late To The Movies explores the world of Italian Neorealism cinema, which was a fascinating departure from post-war Hollywood. Click here to read more.
Okay, onto this month’s recommendations!
That’ll Teach Her by Maz Evans
“She’s worse than Rasputin. Or a cockroach. She’s Cocksputin.”
So what’s it about? When universally disliked headteacher Claudia Stitchwell drops dead during a school event, the official explanation doesn’t quite satisfy the parents of St Nonnatus Primary. Suspicion spreads through the parents’ WhatsApp chat, playground conversations, and gossip networks as amateur detectives begin trying to piece together what really happened. With four plausible suspects, including a beloved school cook, an overworked teaching assistant, an ambitious deputy head and a deeply unpopular bursar, the mystery unfolds through a patchwork of messages, reports and testimonies that gradually reveal the hidden tensions simmering beneath the surface of school life.
While it’s structured as a murder mystery, That’ll Teach Her is just as interested in the social world surrounding education. Evans captures the peculiar intensity of primary school communities, where minor administrative decisions can spark outrage, rumours travel at lightning speed, and parents often find themselves far more emotionally invested than they ever expected to be. The result is a sharply observed comedy of manners wrapped around a genuinely engaging whodunnit.
What’s great about it? This is one of those books that’s laugh out loud funny, because the humour in it rings so true. Evans has a wonderful ability to recognise the inherent absurdity of modern school culture without ever becoming cynical about it. Anyone who’s had to navigate a parents’ WhatsApp group (or indeed any other sort of group chat) will recognise the personalities immediately: the organiser, the oversharer, the worrier, the one who somehow knows everything first. However, the humour feels affectionate rather than cruel, and Evans is able to mine endless comedy from the gap between the trivial concerns occupying the adults and the far more serious events unfolding around them.
Beyond the mystery, the school becomes almost a miniature portrait of wider society, full of people carrying private struggles, ambitions and disappointments that rarely make it into official newsletters or parents’ evenings. Evans balances sharp comedy with genuine empathy, creating characters who feel recognisable rather than caricatured. For a novel about murder, it has a great deal to say about community, education and the strange ways people become entangled in one another’s lives.
Give it a try if: you love British comedy; if you’ve ever had the joy of being in a ridiculous WhatsApp group; you love books which are compulsively readable; you love murder mysteries; you love satire; you love books which make you laugh; you loved the BBC series Motherland; you like reading books which combine different narrative structures and techniques.
Educated by Tara Westover
“Everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind. I had come to believe that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it means to self-create. If I yielded now, I would lose more than an argument. I would lose custody of my own mind. This was the price I was being asked to pay, I understood that now. What my father wanted to cast from me wasn’t a demon: it was me.”
So what’s it about? Tara Westover grew up in a survivalist Mormon family in rural Idaho, isolated from mainstream society and largely cut off from formal education. Her father in particular distrusted schools, hospitals and government institutions, leaving Tara and her siblings to work in the family scrapyard rather than attend lessons. With no conventional schooling and little contact with the outside world, her understanding of history, politics and even basic world events was shaped almost entirely by her family’s beliefs.
Despite these obstacles, Tara was determined to educate herself. Through a combination of self-study, extraordinary persistence and the support of a few key people, she gained admission to university and eventually studied at some of the world’s most prestigious institutions. As her education broadened her horizons, however, she found herself confronting painful questions about memory, identity, loyalty and the price of leaving behind the world, and the family, that had shaped her.
What’s great about it? Educated is ultimately about something far more profound than just academic achievement: the transformative power of learning itself. For Westover, education isn’t simply a route to qualifications or career success, but rather a means of understanding the wider world, worth pursuing for its own sake. The book explores the exhilarating and unsettling process of discovering that there are other ways of seeing, thinking and living.
What makes the book especially powerful is Westover’s remarkable lack of bitterness. She writes with clarity and compassion even when describing deeply troubling experiences, allowing readers to grapple with the complexity of family relationships rather than reducing people to heroes and villains. The result is deeply moving, as we see how intellectual awakening often brings with it difficult choices even as it also provides opportunities for growth. This is a book about education in its broadest and most meaningful sense - not merely what happens in classrooms, but the lifelong process of learning who we are and how we understand the world.
Give it a try if: you love learning just for the sake of it; you like books which immerse you in other ways of living; you’re interested in books about families, especially complex ones; you love memoirs and narrative non-fiction; you love reading about women who take control of their own lives and create something new and different for themselves.
A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik
“Some sorcerers get an affinity for weather magic, or transformation spells, or fantastic combat magics like dear Orion. I got an affinity for mass destruction.”
So what’s it about? In this first book in a trilogy, Galadriel “El” Higgins attends the Scholomance, a school unlike any other. Hidden from the ordinary world and populated by young magicians, it offers students a chance to develop their powers and prepare for adulthood. The catch? Graduation is only possible if you can avoid being killed and eaten by the many monsters eager to devour the students. In a school where there are no teachers to provide guidance, survival depends as much on cunning, alliances and luck as it does on magical talent.
As El navigates her final years at the Scholomance, she must contend with the expectations created by her formidable magical abilities, her own deeply antisocial reputation, and the increasingly dangerous threats lurking within the school’s walls. Alongside her cohort of ambitious classmates and the infuriatingly heroic Orion Lake, she becomes entangled in a struggle that may determine not only who survives graduation, but the future of the magical world itself.
What’s great about it? One of the pleasures of reading this book is the way that Novik gleefully overturns familiar school-story conventions. This is not a cosy boarding school where friendships blossom over midnight feasts and Quidditch matches. Instead, every aspect of school life is filtered through the question of survival. The library might eat you, the cafeteria can kill you, and even walking down the corridor requires strategic planning. Novik takes the well-worn idea of a magical school and pushes it to its darkest extreme, creating a setting that feels fresh and inventive.
While there are plenty of monsters and magical battles, and of course the requisite romance story, the trilogy is also a thoughtful exploration of education and social inequality. The Scholomance mirrors many of the advantages and disadvantages found in the outside world, with wealthy and well-connected students enjoying protections that are unavailable to others. El’s struggle becomes about more than just supernatural dangers when she begins to butt up against systems that reward privilege and perpetuate exclusion. El is a great character: sharp, sarcastic, funny and more than a little prickly, she’s one of my favourite anti-heroes.
Give it a try if: you love books with brilliant female characters; you love anti-heroes; you feel like exploring a darker twist on Harry Potter; you love books which are set inside boarding schools; you like books which take a familiar format or setting and twist it into something new; you love fantasy as a genre, especially when it has something serious to say.
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
“There are such things as ghosts. People everywhere have always known that. And we believe in them every bit as much as Homer did. Only now, we call them by different names. Memory. The unconscious.”
So what’s it about? Surely one of the most loved and classic books of the twentieth century, The Secret History follows Richard Papen as he arrives at a small, elite college in Vermont, eager to leave behind his unremarkable California upbringing and reinvent himself. He finds himself drawn to a tiny, exclusive group of classics students led by the charismatic and enigmatic Professor Julian Morrow, and as he gets to know them, he’s welcomed into a rarefied world of intellectual ambition, privilege and intense friendship. The group appears glamorous and sophisticated from the outside, but beneath the surface lie dangerous obsessions and increasingly blurred moral boundaries.
In a twist on the usual literary mystery format, we know from the opening pages that one member of the group will die at the hands of the others. The novel then retraces the events leading up to the murder, and its aftermath, examining how a circle of intelligent, seemingly civilised young people become capable of extraordinary violence. As Richard is drawn deeper into their world, loyalty, guilt and self-deception begin to exert an increasingly powerful hold over them all.
What’s great about it? Although it’s often described as a literary thriller, The Secret History is also one of the finest novels ever written about higher education and the seductive power of ideas. One of the things I think is particularly compelling about it is the way that Tartt captures the intensity of intellectual life at that particular moment in youth, when books, theories and philosophies can seem capable of transforming reality itself. Tartt understands that education can become not merely a process of learning but a form of identity, aspiration and belonging. Few books evoke so vividly the excitement of discovering a subject that feels capable of explaining the world.
This is also a book that’s rich in atmosphere. The college campus is rendered with such richness that it becomes almost a character in its own right: autumn leaves, ancient texts, candlelit conversations and long winters create a world that feels simultaneously beautiful and claustrophobic. While there are some serious themes being explored - not least the dangers of elitism, groupthink and intellectual arrogance - as readers we never lose sight of why these environments can be so alluring. Dark, unsettling and compulsively readable, it remains one of the defining campus novels of the modern era.
Give it a try if: you love novels with atmosphere; you’re more interested in the how-done-it than the whodunnit; you love books which capture the thrill of possibility and open horizons which education can bring; you like books which explore human emotions and motivation with real depth; you love literary books; you love beautiful prose and great writing; you love classics.
The Examiner by Janice Hallett
“There are only four ways: money, ideology, coercion, and ego. MICE. Four reasons people get caught in a trap.”
So what’s it about? When six students enrol on a multimedia arts master’s programme, they expect a year of creative challenges, academic debate and professional development. Instead, the course becomes the setting for a mystery that unfolds through emails, messages, assignments and official documents. As an external examiner reviews the materials at the end of the course, it becomes clear that something has gone badly wrong during the programme, and that each of the students and tutors may be hiding important pieces of the story.
As with Hallet’s other books, the story is told entirely through the documents assembled for the examiner’s investigation, inviting readers to piece together the truth for themselves. As relationships fray, rivalries emerge and tensions escalate within the cohort, seemingly minor interactions take on increasing significance. What begins as an exploration of academic life gradually develops into a compelling puzzle in which every email, feedback form and project submission may contain a crucial clue.
What’s great about it? Like Hallett’s earlier novels, The Examiner turns readers into detectives, asking them to sift through evidence and draw their own conclusions. The epistolary format is brilliantly suited to an educational setting, where so much of modern academic life exists in written form: assessment criteria, tutor feedback, administrative emails and student correspondence. Hallett demonstrates a keen eye for the language of academia, capturing both its bureaucratic peculiarities and its capacity to shape people’s ambitions, insecurities and relationships.
What elevates the novel beyond a clever puzzle is its understanding of the pressures that exist within educational institutions. The students arrive with different expectations, talents and vulnerabilities, while the staff must balance mentoring, assessment and institutional demands. Hallett explores questions of authority, creativity, fairness and power without ever sacrificing the pace of the mystery. For readers who enjoy both campus novels and crime fiction, it offers the satisfying experience of seeing the familiar world of higher education transformed into the scene of an intricate and highly entertaining whodunnit. None of the characters are especially likeable, but the twists and turns of the story as it unfolds are riveting enough that even if you normally want to have a character to root for, you’ll be intrigued enough to keep reading.
Give it a try if: you love murder mysteries; you love books which ask you to solve the puzzle yourself, especially where you have to find the clues; you love books with unusual formats; you’re interested in the question of what constitutes art; you’ve ever been exasperated by pointless bureaucracy.
Thanks for reading!
I hope you found something good to read here. As ever, I’d love to hear if you’ve read and loved (or even hated) any of the books here, and which ones you’d add to the list. You can reply directly to this email or leave a comment by clicking the button below.
In the meantime, I wish you happy reading,
Kate
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I have to say that reading Educated was a truly enlightening, if at times harrowing, experience. It still haunts me, that's how good it was.
I echo Rayna’s comments about Educated. A good book on the author’s own experiences, I believe.