Mary McCarthy's sharp, satirical campus novel is a fantastic little read exposing the vanity, factionalism and quiet absurdities that flourish beneath the rhetoric of higher education.

Set at the fictional Jocelyn College, the story begins when an unpopular literature lecturer learns he is to be dismissed and responds by constructing an elaborate fiction about his personal circumstances. This little deception gradually entangles colleagues, administrators and students, revealing a university sustained less by truth than by ambition, ideology and self-interest.

Published in 1952, The Groves of Academe anticipated many of the anxieties that still shape universities today: institutional politics, ideological camps, professional precarity and the uneasy relationship between intellectual life and bureaucracy. McCarthy's prose is elegant, mercilessly observant and intellectually playful, making this as much a novel of ideas as of character. A classic for readers of David Lodge, Randall Jarrell, Richard Russo or anyone fascinated by the social theatre of academia.

Panther paperback edition, published 1964. Early UK paperback printing. Good vintage condition with expected edge wear, light creasing and age toning. Binding remains sound and the text is clean throughout.