Sign-In
Cart
Lords of Serendipity
Audio Book
General FictionLiterary Fiction
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: Sep 8 2026
Language: English
A book that's a feast, an occasion and a celebration. Randy Boyagoda delightfully skewers the industrial-academic complex but also creates moving characters who seem to have walked in from the dorm and faculty meeting next door. The result is as moving as it is hysterically funny. --Gary Shteyngart, New York Times bestselling author of Vera, or Faith
An epic campus novel about the hopes and hypocrisies of 21st-century higher education, from one of Canada's most celebrated literary novelists.
Devi is a Sri Lankan village girl who dreams of going to Harvard. Katrina is a middle-class American girl whose life has been designed to get her into an elite liberal arts college. Devi's father cleans toilets in a five-star hotel to pay for his daughter's Indian tutor, who might not be the Oxford student he claims to be on WhatsApp. Katrina's father teaches extra courses at a mediocre technical university to pay for his daughter's academic lifestyle experiences. Meanwhile, his tech-bro TA expertly extorts money from international students worried about flunking and getting deported.
Set between contemporary Sri Lanka and the United States, Lords of Serendipity is a wry, moving, and sharply observed story about how rich and poor alike try to get ahead by going to university. It's about dreams and ambition meeting corruption and hypocrisy. It's about what parents are willing to do for their children, and about what strivers and hustlers are willing to do when they meet gatekeepers.
This is the 21st-century global campus novel, a story about two teenage girls from opposite sides of the world with the same dream: four years in a quadrangle-shaped paradise that offers lots of super amazing courses and super amazing protests. The novel couldn't be more timely in this absurd and perilous-feeling moment for both American life and higher education.Randy Boyagoda's Lords of Serendipity is utterly fantastic and timely beyond belief. This is the campus novel we've all been waiting for: tender, eviscerating, perfect. --Junot DÃaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Also in
General Fiction
Elizabeth Spencer: Novels & Stories (Loa #344): The Voice at the Back Door / The Light in the Piazza / Knights and Dragons / Stories
Spencer, Elizabeth
Hardcover
Anniversaries, Volume 2: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl, April 1968-August 1968
Johnson, Uwe
Paperback
Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose, and Diary Excerpts
Plath, Sylvia
Paperback
Philip Roth: Novels 1967-1972 (Loa #158): When She Was Good / Portnoy's Complaint / Our Gang / The Breast
Roth, Philip
Hardcover
Selected Writings: Robert Musil: Young Torless, Three Women, the Perfecting of a Love, and Other Writings
Musil, Robert
Agee, Joel
Paperback