Martin Travis

When it becomes common knowledge that a Cambridge college's principal endowment came from an 18th-century slave trader, the fellows respond with impressive moral clarity: remove the portrait, rename the feast, and keep the money. Crisis managed, consciences clear; until a £15 million donation from a tech billionaire with fossil fuel, gambling and private prison interests forces them to examine whether their principles were ever more than performance. As the Master's failing health triggers a succession battle, and an American visiting professor proves to be less than he seems, symbolic gestures give way to naked ambition, and a distinguished moral philosophy professor discovers that living rent-free makes public ethics surprisingly flexible. Through it all, the Master's secretary observes with dry precision as intelligent people construct elaborate justifications for coming to convenient private conclusions.

In the autumn of 1971, six young people go up to Northwick — a modern provincial university of no great distinction. Tom, Angela, Moira, Ruth, Colin and Piers arrive with ideals, insecurities and wardrobes that don't quite match their ambitions. Through supervisions, late-night arguments, improbable romances and one unforgettable holiday in Greece, they discover that growing up is far messier than any syllabus can contain. Exams loom, alliances shift, and the cheerful confidence of youth begins to blur into something more complicated. Witty, affectionate and sharply observant, Going Up captures the awkward glory of student life in 1970s England, when education still promised both intellectual adventure and escape.

In these eight short stories, Martin Travis sketches the lives of people who think for a living and still can't quite make sense of themselves. From the registrar's office to the seminar room, from the viva table to the TV studio sofa, Scenes of an Academic Nature moves through a university where everyone is both observing and being observed. An administrator at her window, an invigilator in a silent exam hall, a media-savvy professor under studio lights, a senior manager selling "bold change," a poetry teacher losing track of the line between text and life, an ageing philosopher sorting through his own footnotes. Each is caught in a small, intense moment when professional role and private self no longer quite align. Wry, clear-eyed and unexpectedly tender, these scenes reveal academia not as a world apart but as a place where people negotiate desire, power and hope under fluorescent light, one carefully chosen word at a time.

When Edward's wife dies unexpectedly, his carefully ordered life begins to come apart. A successful architect with no one left to build for, he sets out on a quiet pilgrimage to visit four friends from his university days — hoping their lives might reveal a pattern that his own has lost. As the journey unfolds, Edward confronts grief, memory and the uneasy passage of time. Each encounter forces him to rethink what it means to endure, to change, and to begin again after loss. Subtle, resonant and deeply humane, Refunding Edward is a novel about disorientation and renewal — a moving exploration of how the past shapes, and sometimes restores, the uncertain present.

Henry Markham thought he was just passing through. One year into his first lecturing job at Northwick — a brand-new university still smelling of wet concrete and policy documents — he has survived student protests, pink memos, Founders' Day speeches and a parade of colleagues who could have stepped out of a campus novel. Now a single cream envelope in his pigeonhole announces that Senate has "confirmed" his appointment, subject to "the usual conditions". As Henry spends the day doing the rounds — up the tower, along the corridors, into the Senior Common Room and finally around the campus perimeter — he discovers that confirmation is less about glory than about being quietly factored into other people's plans. Meg, Aisha, Dennis and Angela have already decided he belongs; Human Resources has merely caught up. Wry, observant and dryly funny, this novel follows a young academic as he realises that the life he thought he was sampling has become the life he is living — and that the university he intended to write about has, inconveniently, begun to write him in.

At the once-sleepy University of Northwick, reform is in the air and anxiety in the corridors. A Quality Assurance inspection and a team of consultants promise to drag the institution — kicking and grumbling — into the age of "relevance" and "transferable skills." For five lecturers, the changes cut close to home. Careers, loyalties and ideals are tested as a new regime led by the ambitious Simon Felker reshapes the life of the mind into a marketable product. Amid the upheaval, an ill-judged conference fling between Henry Markham and Lorna Paxton ripples outwards, unsettling friendships and exposing fault lines that reach well beyond the seminar rooms. Sharply funny and quietly rueful, Carrying On charts the uneasy transformation of a university — and the lives caught up in its relentless rebranding.

Henry Markham has finally escaped the university — but not the shadow it cast. Now separated from his wife and living alone in a Northwick suburb, he fills his days with lectures to the U3A, book tours and half-hearted attempts at a long-stalled novel. When a spell of writer's block drives him to a rural writers' retreat, Henry confronts what remains of his ambition, his career, and the petty academic wars that shaped him. Out of this reckoning comes The Glass Quadrangle and, perhaps, a late understanding of how to live without resentment or regret. Wry, observant, and compassionate, this is a portrait of a man learning to forgive his past and make peace with the life that follows.

At Cranbeck University, mediocrity is a virtue and ambition a health hazard. Lecturer Will Davis is hanging onto his job, his marriage and his dignity by a fraying thread, as campus rivalries, sexual missteps and institutional absurdities close in on him over one disastrous term. Sharply observed, savagely funny and unexpectedly humane, The Trouble with Will is a classic campus farce about bad behaviour, low stakes and the alarming ease with which a reasonably intelligent man can lose control of his own life.

In 1970s Foxleigh, the Amateur Dramatic Society is one of those institutions everyone assumes will continue indefinitely, sustained by familiar faces, committee meetings and the willingness of a dependable few to do rather more than they intended. For Richard Fairburn, its latest production ought to be straightforward: choose a play, cast it, rehearse it and somehow get everybody safely to the final curtain.

The choice is All Mod Cons, a cheerful boarding-house farce requiring little more than good timing, several reliable doors and actors capable of remembering where they are supposed to be. None proves quite as simple as expected.

As rehearsals gather momentum, the production draws in an unlikely company. Sandra, who works at Mirage and has never thought of herself as an actress, finds herself on stage; her husband Terry discovers that theatrical problems are less easily repaired than houses; retired headmaster Mr Larkin brings formidable seriousness to the role of Colonel Fanshawe; and Julian approaches amateur performance with distinctly professional confidence. Around them, Maggie, Edith, Martin, Helen, Al and the rest of FADS attempt to impose varying degrees of order on an enterprise which seems peculiarly resistant to it.

Yet somewhere among the missed cues, troublesome scenery, costume fittings, committee decisions and evenings at St Barnabas, something else begins to happen. People who thought they knew one another discover that familiarity is not quite the same thing. New friendships form, private certainties loosen, and the play gradually becomes less important than the company assembled to perform it.

Warm, sardonic and sharply observant, The Play's the Thing is a comedy of suburban life, amateur theatre and the considerable consequences of taking something apparently trivial very seriously. Above all, it is about the unexpected intimacy of making something together—and what remains after the curtain finally comes down.

Forthcoming.