This month’s theme for the Spell the Month in Books linkup is “Back to School”. Education isn’t confined to the schoolroom however so I’m taking a liberal approach to the topic by including university-related books and non-traditional places of education.

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The Schooldays of jesus by J M Coetzee: this Booker Prize nominee from 2016 features an unusual kind of school. It’s an academy of dance where everything is taught through the medium of dance. it’s pupils try to achieve a higher level of enlightenment through the mystical Dance of the Universe. My review is here.

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An Education by Lynn Barber

Award winning journalist Lynn Barber was a 16-year-old schoolgirl when she embarked on an affair with a suave older man. It was the beginning of a different kind of “education” from the one she planned to pursue at Oxford University. Nightclubs, art auctions, restaurants and Parisian boulevards were much more exciting than English literature textbooks.

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The Piano Teacher by Janice Y K Lee

Hong Kong in the 1940s and 50s is the setting for this novel about a British expat who becomes a piano teacher to the daughter of a wealthy couple,. There’s a love triangle plot but the dual time frame narrative reveals the cruelty of the Japanese occupation of the island.

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Tom Brown’s Schooldays by Thomas Hughes

I dug deep into the memory bank for this one!. It’s a children’s classic from the 1850s which recounts the adventures of a young English boy at Rugby School. This was an early example of the kind of story popular with the Victorians because it celebrated the values of bravery and integrity they expected of their young men.

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Notes from an Exhibition by Patrick Gale

Thee’s only the most superficial of links between this novel and education but I’m using it anyway. The connection is that in many degree programmes (art, textiles, fashion for example) undergraduates are required to stage an exhibition of their work as part of their final assessment . Really I just wanted an excuse to highlight a novel I love. My review is here.

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The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

Set partly in a school with a central character who is a teacher; this is such a well-known work of fiction that any further description is unecessary..

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Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh.

“Oxford, in those days, was still a city of aquatint”, is how Charles Ryder recalls his time at one of the colleges that make up the University of Oxford. He was a model student until he becomes friends with Lord Sebastian Flyte and gets sucked in by the glamour of the Flyte family and their ancestral home of Brideshead.

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Educated by Tara Westover

Until the age of 17, Tara Westover had never crossed the threshold of a schoolroom. Her father, a survivalist convinced the end of the world was nigh, didn’t believe his children needed schooling. Just as he didn’t believe they needed doctors or medicines. Tara had other ideas. Though it meant she became estranged from most of her family, she got herself into college, then a scholarship to Brigham Young University university and onto a masters programme at Trinity College, Cambridge. Educated is her memoir about survival.

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Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi

Azar Nafisi was a Professor of English when fundamentalists seized control of universities in Iran in the late 1970s. She was later dismissed from her post because she refused to wear a veil. In secret she gathered a small group of her female subjects to meet at her home and discuss banned novels from the west. The book is hard to read because of its complicated non linear structure but it contains a powerful message about the right to an education.

.If you fancy having a go at Spell the Month, you’ll find all the info you need on the website of the host, Reviews From the Stacks.