Cambridge, with its ancient colleges, winding lanes, and intellectual history, offers a wonderful setting for stories. If you enjoy novels where the atmosphere of this unique university city plays a part, here are a few books you might find interesting.
This story takes you right inside the walls of a Cambridge college in the 1930s. The fellows must elect a new Master, and the whole process stirs up intense rivalries and hidden ambitions. You see the deep divisions form.
Some fellows back the brilliant but perhaps difficult scientist, Paul Jago, a more traditional choice, while others support the smooth, progressive Tom Orbell. Personal loyalties get tangled with academic politics, and the characters face some tough moral questions.
This is the first book in Snow’s series that follows Lewis Eliot through his life. Part of his journey unfolds in Cambridge. You see the university world through Eliot’s eyes as he deals with his career path, his relationships, and the webs of influence around him.
Eliot observes others and makes choices that show the pressures people felt about getting ahead and staying loyal during that time.
E. M. Forster tells the story of Rickie Elliot, a sensitive young man with a physical disability, who heads to Cambridge. His time there introduces him to philosophy and deep friendships, especially with the charismatic Stewart Ansell.
The narrative moves between the intellectual air of Cambridge and the more grounded life of the Wiltshire countryside. These shifts highlight Rickie’s internal struggles as he tries to figure out who he is and where he belongs, separate from his difficult family background.
This one is pure satire set in Porterhouse, a fictional Cambridge college that clings stubbornly to its outdated, bizarre traditions. Imagine the chaos when a thoroughly modern, reform-minded Master arrives.
He wants to change everything, which causes uproar among the fellows and staff, especially Skullion, the fiercely loyal head porter. The plot involves ancient statutes, lots of food and drink, and the mysterious condition known as the “Porterhouse Blue”.
It’s a very funny look at academic absurdity.
Set in 1912 Cambridge, this novel introduces Fred Fairly, a junior fellow at the fictional St. Angelicus College. Fred is dedicated to physics and reason until a bicycle accident changes everything.
He crashes into Daisy Saunders, a practical young woman training to be a nurse, who definitely doesn’t belong in his rational world. Their unexpected meeting sparks questions about chance, science, faith, and the possibility of love between two very different people.
Fitzgerald beautifully captures the Cambridge atmosphere just before the First World War.
Here’s a science fiction story with roots in Cambridge. It’s 1998, and the world faces an ecological disaster caused by blooming ocean algae.
A group of scientists, including John Renfrew in Cambridge, desperately tries to send a warning message back in time to 1962 using faster-than-light tachyons.
The narrative alternates between the future team and a physicist, Gordon Bernstein, at the University of California, La Jolla in 1962, who picks up strange noise in an experiment.
The Cambridge sections show the intense academic effort and hope behind the attempt to alter the past.
This book imagines a fascinating dinner party held in C. P. Snow’s rooms at Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1949. The host invites Alan Turing, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Erwin Schrödinger, and J. B. S. Haldane. What do these brilliant minds discuss?
The potential of artificial intelligence and the question: Can machines truly think? Casti uses this fictional gathering to explore their real ideas and personalities. You get a seat at the table as they argue about computation, consciousness, and the future.
Jill Dawson focuses on the famous poet Rupert Brooke during his time in Cambridge and Grantchester before the First World War. The story paints a picture of his magnetic charm, his circle of friends (the Neo-Pagans), and his complicated relationships.
It also gives a voice to Nell Golightly, a fictional housemaid whose life intersects with Brooke’s. Through their interactions, you see the social divides of the era and get a sense of the real person behind the later myth of the doomed war poet.
Written much earlier but published posthumously, Forster’s novel tells the story of Maurice Hall. He goes from school to Cambridge, a place where he starts to understand his feelings for other men.
The book follows his emotional journey through his relationship with fellow student Clive Durham, who represents conformity, and later with Alec Scudder, a gamekeeper who offers a different path.
Cambridge is where Maurice begins his search for love and acceptance in an England where his identity must remain hidden from society.