Arriving during O Week, her welcome to Sydney is fuelled by copious amounts of alcohol, ending in a non-consensual sexual encounter that becomes a thematic centrepiece in the text. Protagonist Michaela is a high-achieving scholarship student from Canberra, who is a resident at the fictional women’s-only ‘Fairfax College’. Recent University of Sydney Philosophy and Law graduate, Diana Reid’s debut novel, Love and Virtue, intends to fill this gap, taking readers into the elite world of residential colleges at a fictionalised Sydney university.
But despite more people going to university in Australia than ever before, the national contribution to campus fiction is surprisingly paltry. We chuckle at the familiar awkwardness in Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, lament in the melancholy of John William’s Stoner, are frustrated by the tumult of Sally Rooney’s Normal People and are perplexed by the mystery of Donna Tart’s The Secret History. Wounded by the growing sense of distance that we currently feel from a so-called ‘normal’ campus experience, we flock to fiction to get our quick fix.
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