Top ten books about boarding school

James Scudamore is the author of the novels English Monsters, Wreaking, Heliopolis and The Amnesia Clinic. He has received the Somerset Maugham Award and been nominated for the Costa First Novel Award, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Man Booker Prize.

At the Guardian he tagged ten top books about boarding school, including:

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

One of Ishiguro’s great gifts is to take a very specific context, loaded with constraints, and extract from it a voice and a story that become powerfully universal. Here, the backdrop is Hailsham, a boarding school in the English countryside, where, it emerges, the pupils are clones created for the purpose of having their organs harvested. As the novel progresses, its surface calmness and simplicity are increasingly at odds with a mounting and devastating sense of loss as the novel evolves into a meditation on life’s compromises and squandered opportunities.

Read about another entry on the list.

Never Let Me Go is on Caroline Zancan's list of eight novels about students and teachers behaving badly, LitHub's list of the ten books that defined the 2000s, Meg Wolitzer's ten favorite books list, Jeff Somers's lists of nine science fiction novels that imagine the future of healthcare and "five pairs of books that have nothing to do with each other—and yet have everything to do with each other" and eight tales of technology run amok and top seven speculative works for those who think they hate speculative fiction, a list of five books that shaped Jason Gurley's Eleanor, Anne Charnock's list of five favorite books with fictitious works of art, Esther Inglis-Arkell's list of nine great science fiction books for people who don't like science fiction, Sabrina Rojas Weiss's list of ten favorite boarding school novels, Allegra Frazier's top four list of great dystopian novels that made it to the big screen, James Browning's top ten list of boarding school books, Jason Allen Ashlock and Mink Choi's top ten list of tragic love stories, Allegra Frazier's list of seven characters whose jobs are worse than yours, Shani Boianjiu's list of five top novels about coming of age, Karen Thompson Walker's list of five top "What If?" books, Lloyd Shepherd's top ten list of weird histories, and John Mullan's lists of ten of the best men writing as women in literature and ten of the best sentences as titles.

--Marshal Zeringue