Three Queer Books About University, Youth, and Desire

Why these three books, why now

Campus life turns up often in queer fiction. That makes sense. University is where many people first name what they feel. This week, three novels use the campus as a stage. They are set in different decades and different countries. One is a British classic from the 1970s. One is a recent American debut. One comes from France. Together they show how much has changed — and how much has not. The darker sides of desire show up here too, just dressed in lecture halls and student bars.

The Swimming-Pool Library — Alan Hollinghurst, 1988 (Chatto & Windus)

Hollinghurst's debut is set in London, summer 1983. Will Beckwith is twenty-five and wealthy. He spends his days at a private swimming pool. He spends his nights in gay bars and cruising grounds. Then he meets an elderly lord with a complicated past. That encounter pulls Will into a hidden history of gay life in Britain.

The novel covers roughly sixty years of queer experience. Hollinghurst writes with cold precision. His sentences are long and controlled. Pleasure and privilege sit uncomfortably close together. Will is not always likeable. That is exactly the point.

What makes this novel unusual is its scale. Hollinghurst is not writing a coming-out story. He is writing about class, race, and the cost of living freely before rights existed. The university setting is mostly background here — Will is a recent Oxford graduate — but his education shapes every page.

There is no Dutch translation currently in print. The English original remains easy to find. This book suits readers who enjoy literary fiction with weight and historical depth. Find it via independent booksellers or the publisher's backlist online.

This is one of the finest British novels of the twentieth century. It rewards patience and careful reading.

Real Life — Brandon Taylor, 2020 (Riverhead Books)

Wallace is a Black gay biochemistry PhD student at a Midwestern American university. The novel takes place over one weekend. In those two days, something shifts in Wallace's world. A colleague destroys his research. Old friendships grow strained. A new and ambiguous intimacy begins.

Taylor writes in close third person. The prose stays tightly inside Wallace's experience. Everything feels heightened — a look across a dinner table, a careless comment. The novel is quiet but not slow. Tension builds from small moments.

What is striking is how Taylor handles race and sexuality together — without making either feel like a theme or a lesson. Wallace exists as a full person. His loneliness is specific to him, not symbolic.

Real Life was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2020. A Dutch translation does not appear to exist yet. The English edition is widely available in bookshops and online. This book is ideal for readers who liked quieter, domestic queer fiction that stays close to one character's inner life.

Brandon Taylor is a writer to follow closely. This debut announces a serious talent.

En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule — Édouard Louis, 2014 (Seuil) — English: The End of Eddy, 2017, Harvill Secker; Dutch: Het einde van Eddy, 2015, De Bezige Bij

This is a memoir-novel. Louis grew up in a poor village in northern France. He was a sensitive, effeminate boy in a community that had no space for that. The book follows his childhood and early school years. It ends when he leaves for a theatre school in Amiens — his escape.

Louis writes without sentimentality. He describes violence, mockery, and shame with a flat, documentary tone. That restraint makes the book harder to read, not easier. The cruelty lands because it is not dramatised.

What separates this from other queer coming-of-age books is the class argument. Louis is not just writing about being gay in a hostile place. He is writing about what poverty does to people — how it shapes anger, homophobia, and survival instincts. The school scenes are especially sharp.

The book is short — under 200 pages — and reads quickly. But it stays with you. The Dutch translation, Het einde van Eddy, is published by De Bezige Bij and available in most Dutch and Belgian bookshops. The English translation by Frank Wynne is excellent.

This is a difficult book about a difficult childhood. It is also a necessary one.

What these three books share

None of these novels offer easy comfort. All three place their protagonists in institutions — universities, schools, academic labs — and ask what it costs to exist there as a queer person. Hollinghurst looks back at history. Taylor zooms in on a single weekend. Louis traces a whole childhood to its breaking point.

The campuses and classrooms in these books are not just settings. They are systems. Each writer shows how those systems reward some people and quietly crush others. That is what makes these three novels sit well together, despite their very different tones and origins.

If you want to explore further, our round-up of queer books about double lives and secrets covers similar ground — people performing one self while hiding another.