Q: Which books would you recommend to help navigate the anxious yet exciting change to university?

Sophie Tice, 19, gap-year student, Cirencester, Gloucestershire

A: Alfie Packham, deputy editor of Guardian Universities, says:

Now is the ideal time to read widely and randomly, before you’re tied down by compulsory reading lists. Fiction or non-fiction. Go bananas. You never know what stories and authors will stay with you. At 19, I remember latching on to Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, a sad but uplifting novel partially set on a university campus. Something about this story of a “fat Dominican nerd” really spoke to me at the time, as a former Dungeons & Dragons player.

There are many “campus novels” that you might find you can relate to at your stage in life. Sally Rooney’s Normal People comes to mind. Both this and her first book, Conversations With Friends, are full of erudite young women, whose relationships are complicated and engrossing.

Then there’s the witty On Beauty by Zadie Smith, set in a fictional American university. In these self-contained worlds, a novelist can explore the biggest themes: education, love, class, adulthood.

And there are plenty from the last century that still hold up well. In John Williams’s 1965 novel Stoner, the eponymous William Stoner moves away from his family’s farm to the University of Missouri, where he falls in love with the study of literature. Maybe you’ll find some common ground here, when you leave Gloucestershire. Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited is another classic of the genre.

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath famously captured the angst of a young person awaiting her future. At one point the protagonist, Esther Greenwood, imagines her life branching out before her like a fig tree. Each fig represents a different possibility: family life, lovers, careers, exciting travels. She writes: “I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”

And, in case you were after something more literal, there are some guides to university living, such as Lucy Tobin’s A Guide to Uni Life, which includes loads of practical tips on getting started as a student. Best of luck.

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