by C. P. Snow
First published 1988
Humphrey Leigh returns to Cambridge as an aging academic, settling into what he expects will be his quiet final years at the university. The elderly don finds himself drawn into a web of personal and institutional conflicts that test his principles. When a scandal erupts involving colleagues he has known for decades, Leigh must navigate between loyalty and justice. His decisions carry weight beyond his own reputation, affecting the lives of younger academics whose careers hang in the balance. As Leigh confronts the gap between his ideals and the messy realities of human behavior, he discovers that moral clarity becomes more elusive with age, not clearer. The veneer of civilized academic life proves thinner than he believed, revealing the raw ambitions and compromises beneath.
Genres: literary-fiction, 20th-century, contemporary, adult-fiction, academia, academic
Vibes: intimate, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: aging-protagonist, moral-ambiguity
Setting: Cambridge
Period: 20th-century
328 pages · Paperback · Scribner