Required Reading

Set in the 1980s, this novel follows Martin Langley, a graduate student and then professor whose faith in academic life is unraveling. He comes to the profession with a belief in books, teaching, and honest inquiry, but finds himself in a world increasingly shaped by departmental quarrels, stubborn orthodoxies, and institutional politics. Gradually, the life he had worked so hard to enter begins to feel less like a calling than a compromise. He grows estranged from his mentors and students, and from the ideals that first drew him to teaching.

When an unexpected inheritance brings him north to a dilapidated house on the Michigan coast, Martin imagines the move as a temporary retreat. Instead, it becomes a reckoning. Faced with repairs he barely knows how to make and a town in no hurry to accept him, he is forced to confront the limits of his detachment. His growing bond with Clara, a woman shaped by early hardship and betrayal, leads him into forms of care and responsibility no seminar ever prepared him for.