Lords of Serendipity: A Novel

"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 Díaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Randy Boyagoda is a novelist who writes about books and ideas for publications including the Atlantic, the New York Times, and the Financial Times. His fiction has been nominated for the Giller Prize and the Dublin Literary Award and named a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice and a Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year. He is a professor of English and director of the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto.

Named a Best Book of Fall 2026 by Oprah Daily and People

“A darkly funny, continent-hopping satire with a sharp eye on the bottom line.” –People

“This clever, continent-hopping read expands the frame of the classic campus novel to include the often-invisible characters behind a university education: the parents. . . . Boyagoda's mordant satire of academia and its costs is also a touching tribute to what parents will do for their children.” –Oprah Daily

“Ambitious…It’s the kind of no-holds-barred book only a consummate insider would know to write—but only one who is also conveniently outside the American university system could get away with writing. . . . An old-fashioned Dickensian tale, it sweeps across continents and campuses.” –Pamela Paul, The Wall Street Journal

“Dazzling...The way Boyagoda develops and connects these characters is as compelling as it is seamless, merrily leading readers to the cynical revelations at its core. Working with many of the same themes as Min Jin Lee in American Hagwon, Boyagoda is serious about the bond between parents and children, bringing his satire’s plot to an unexpected and satisfying close with a climactic scene… Richard Russo meets Mohsin Hamid in this knowing tale of academia and the lives of struggling South Asians.” –Kirkus (starred review)

"Engrossing…Boyagoda offers a clear-eyed view into academia’s competition, corruption, and exploitation. This leaves readers with much to chew on.” –Publishers Weekly

“It’s hard to miss the parallels between this novel and the social satires of Victorian-era novelist Anthony Trollope… A smart cautionary tale about the perils of ambition.” –BookPage

"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

“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 Díaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“This is a new kind of campus novel, a wicked but humane satire that envisions a global community of strivers, charlatans, jaded bureaucrats, and ethically challenged scholars whose lives and destinies keep intersecting in unexpected places with unpredictable outcomes. Randy Boyagoda is a wry and clear-eyed guide to this three-ring academic circus of careerism, venality, and stubborn hope for a better future.” –Tom Perrotta, New York Times bestselling author of The Leftovers and Ghost Town

"Lords of Serendipity is a sparkling, humane, and irresistible campus novel. As Randy Boyagoda celebrates (and subverts) the comedy of college, he offers what any good education should: not a microcosm, sealed off from the world, but a wide-ranging, free-thinking inquiry into life beyond the ivory tower." –Garth Risk Hallberg, author of City on Fire and The Second Coming

Lords of Serendipity: A Novel by Randy Boyagoda is a sharply funny, deeply humane campus novel about education, ambition, class, family sacrifice, corruption, and the complicated promises of higher education. Published by Mariner Books in September 2026, the novel moves between contemporary Sri Lanka and the United States and follows people from very different economic and cultural backgrounds who are connected by the same powerful desire: to gain access to an elite university education. At the center are Devi, a Sri Lankan village girl who dreams of attending Harvard or another prestigious Western university, and Katrina, an American student whose entire upbringing has been organized around getting into an elite liberal arts college. Around them, Boyagoda constructs a much larger network of parents, professors, tutors, students, administrators, and opportunists, creating what the publisher describes as a global campus novel for the twenty-first century.

The title Lords of Serendipity is itself meaningful because “Serendipity” has a historical connection to Sri Lanka, once known as Serendip. The novel uses this idea of chance and discovery ironically. Higher education is often presented as a place where young people discover themselves, encounter unexpected ideas, and find opportunities they could never have imagined. But Boyagoda asks whether those opportunities are really available by chance anymore, or whether they are increasingly determined by money, social connections, privilege, geography, and carefully engineered advantage. The novel's characters spend enormous amounts of energy trying to manufacture their own “serendipity.” They pay for tutoring, manipulate systems, exploit loopholes, work extra jobs, pursue prestigious credentials, and make morally questionable decisions because they believe that admission to the right university can transform an entire life.

Devi's story provides the emotional foundation of the novel. She is a talented Sri Lankan girl from a modest background who dreams of entering one of the world's most prestigious universities. Her ambition is enormous because the stakes are enormous. For Devi and her family, admission to a famous Western university is not simply about obtaining a degree. It represents escape from economic limitation, personal achievement, family honor, and the possibility of a radically different future. Her dream is therefore both inspiring and dangerous. The more important the dream becomes, the more sacrifices her family is willing to make to keep it alive.

Devi's father embodies this sacrifice. He works cleaning toilets at a five-star hotel in Colombo, taking on exhausting work so that his daughter can afford tutoring and university applications. The contrast between his labor and the prestigious institutions his daughter hopes to enter is one of Boyagoda's sharpest observations. He performs some of the least glamorous work in the service economy while trying to purchase access to a world that may never recognize what his family has sacrificed. The novel does not treat him simply as a symbol of poverty, however. He is presented as a determined parent who believes deeply in his daughter's potential and is willing to endure humiliation and exhaustion because he wants her to have opportunities he never had.

Devi's pursuit of an elite education also exposes the economics of university admissions. Application fees, tutoring, preparation, travel, and other expenses accumulate quickly. For a wealthy family, these costs may be inconvenient; for a poor family, they can become life-changing burdens. Boyagoda uses this difference to question the language of meritocracy. Universities may describe themselves as selecting the most talented students, but talent does not exist independently of resources. A student who can afford years of specialized tutoring and professional guidance enters the competition differently from one whose family must work multiple shifts to pay for a single application.

Katrina represents another side of the same system. She is a middle-class American girl whose life has been deliberately structured around admission to an elite college. Her circumstances are vastly more comfortable than Devi's, but her story reveals that privilege does not necessarily eliminate anxiety. Katrina has been taught to understand her future through the language of credentials, achievement, and institutional prestige. Her education has become a project carefully managed by adults. She is expected to attend the right school, acquire the right experiences, and construct the right identity. The result is a different kind of pressure: she has opportunities, but she also feels the burden of expectations.

Katrina's father, Jack Bayern, is a statistics professor at Arcadia Tech, a mediocre technical university. He takes on additional teaching work to help pay for his daughter's elite education. This parallel with Devi's father is one of the novel's most effective structural ideas. One man cleans toilets; the other teaches overloaded university courses. Their jobs, social positions, and cultures are very different, but both fathers are sacrificing themselves financially for their children. Boyagoda thereby refuses to make the story a simple opposition between rich and poor. Instead, he shows that the obsession with elite education can place pressure on families across class lines.

Jack becomes the novel's major window into the corruption inside higher education. He discovers that Allard Hamburger, a graduate student and teaching assistant, has been operating a scheme in which grades are effectively sold to international students who are frightened about failing. The scandal becomes particularly disturbing because the students involved are vulnerable. International students may face enormous financial consequences and even immigration problems if they fail. Their fear creates an opportunity for exploitation. The university, rather than responding with complete transparency, becomes concerned with protecting its institutional reputation.

Allard's motivations make the corruption even more complicated. He is not portrayed as a cartoon villain who cheats simply because he is greedy. His ambitions are connected to his desire for recognition and academic status. He wants to establish himself professionally and attract the attention of his famous astronomer father, who abandoned him before he was born. The absurdity of his ambition is central to Boyagoda's satire: an institution supposedly devoted to truth and intellectual integrity becomes a place where people manipulate truth because they believe prestige will eventually justify their actions.

The scandal becomes more serious when Johannes, one of Allard's clients and Devi's tutor, dies by suicide. This event exposes the human consequences hidden beneath the university's administrative language. Cheating is not merely an abstract violation of academic rules when students' futures, family investments, immigration status, and psychological well-being are tied to their grades. Boyagoda uses the incident to show how institutional systems can become frighteningly detached from the individual lives they are supposed to serve. Jack is deeply disturbed by what he discovers, but the university's response demonstrates how difficult it can be for an individual to challenge a powerful institution.

Jack's response becomes one of the novel's central moral questions: What should a person do after discovering wrongdoing inside an institution that rewards silence? Rather than presenting whistleblowing as a simple act of courage, Boyagoda explores the costs. Jack is offered paid administrative leave and a sabbatical in exchange for keeping quiet. The arrangement is almost comically absurd because the university can make a serious problem disappear by giving the person who discovered it a comfortable place to go away. The episode illustrates how institutions can absorb dissent without necessarily correcting the behavior that caused it.

Meanwhile, the novel continues to examine the relationship between education and social mobility through Devi's increasingly desperate attempts to gain admission. Her applications to elite universities do not produce the straightforward success story she hopes for. Instead, rejection forces her and her family to confront how arbitrary and competitive the admissions process can be. Devi's intelligence is real, but intelligence alone does not guarantee access. The novel's title becomes increasingly ironic: what looks like luck from the outside is often the result of hidden advantages that remain invisible to those who lack them.

The novel's structure becomes especially interesting when these separate stories begin to intersect. Jack eventually travels to Sri Lanka for a new research position and meets Devi in connection with her application to Arcadia. This meeting connects the American academic storyline with the Sri Lankan family narrative. Jack is already struggling with the moral consequences of what he has discovered, while Devi is waiting for a decision that could determine her future. Their encounter therefore brings together two people standing on opposite sides of the university gate: one is an academic questioning the institution, and the other is a student desperate to enter it.

Jack's ethical difficulties do not end in Sri Lanka. He discovers that the patron supporting his new academic opportunity has been falsifying data. This creates another version of the same problem he faced at Arcadia. Again, he must decide whether professional advancement is worth remaining silent about wrongdoing. The repetition is deliberate. Boyagoda suggests that corruption is not an isolated defect belonging to one bad person or one dysfunctional university. It can become systemic when institutions reward reputation, funding, career advancement, and prestige more strongly than honesty.

The Sri Lankan setting also gives the novel a broader cultural dimension. Boyagoda contrasts contemporary Sri Lankan life with American higher education while showing how global the desire for elite credentials has become. Students and parents around the world increasingly understand universities through global rankings and brand names. Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, Princeton, Yale, and Stanford become almost mythical destinations. Devi's use of the humorous term “Ochpys” for the prestigious university group captures how these institutions can become objects of obsession.

Yet the novel never completely dismisses education itself. This is one of its most important nuances. Boyagoda is satirizing the industrial-academic complex, not arguing that learning has no value. His characters repeatedly demonstrate a genuine desire for knowledge, recognition, intellectual freedom, or a better life. The problem is that those legitimate desires become entangled with institutional prestige and economic competition. The question gradually becomes: What is education actually for? The novel asks whether university should be primarily about learning and intellectual growth or whether it has become a system for producing status, credentials, social networks, and economic advantage.

Family is therefore just as important as academia. Lords of Serendipity is ultimately a novel about what parents will sacrifice for their children. Devi's father sacrifices his body and dignity through exhausting labor. Jack sacrifices time and income to finance Katrina's education. Other parents make their own compromises because they believe a university credential can protect their children from uncertainty. Boyagoda treats these sacrifices with genuine sympathy even while satirizing the system that makes them necessary. This is why the novel's comedy does not feel entirely cynical. Beneath the absurdity are people who love their children and want to give them opportunities.

The book's humor comes from the enormous gap between the ideals universities advertise and the realities of institutional life. Colleges speak about inclusion, intellectual freedom, social justice, and personal development, yet they can simultaneously be expensive, bureaucratic, competitive, status-conscious, and financially exploitative. Boyagoda's satire targets students, professors, parents, administrators, and academic culture alike. A recent Wall Street Journal discussion of the novel highlights its criticism of administrative ineptitude, cheating, economic exploitation, and performative activism while emphasizing that Boyagoda's satire remains connected to a sincere belief in education.

The novel's climax brings the separate strands together in a way that reinforces its central moral concerns. Kirkus describes the conclusion as an unexpected and satisfying convergence involving Jack and Devi's mother, Ammi, a woman who works cleaning hotel toilets and has no illusions about the world. This is a fitting choice because Ammi represents a kind of truthfulness that the academic world often lacks. She understands work, money, sacrifice, and social inequality without needing elaborate theories to explain them. Her perspective cuts through the institutional language surrounding education and exposes the human realities underneath.

For readers searching for a summary of Lords of Serendipity, Randy Boyagoda's new novel explained, a campus novel about higher education, books about college admissions and privilege, novels about academic corruption, or fiction about parents sacrificing for their children's education, the book offers an unusually broad perspective. It is simultaneously a Sri Lankan family story, an American campus novel, a satire of academia, and a meditation on social mobility. Its international scope allows Boyagoda to show that the university system cannot be understood simply through the experiences of professors and students on campus. Behind every student is often a family making sacrifices, and behind every admission is an economic and social system that determines who gets the opportunity to compete.

Ultimately, Lords of Serendipity is less interested in answering whether elite universities are “good” or “bad” than in asking what happens when people begin to believe that admission to those institutions is the key to a successful life. Randy Boyagoda shows how a noble desire for education can become mixed with fear, vanity, desperation, money, competition, and corruption. Yet he also shows that the desire itself can be deeply beautiful. Devi wants a better future. Her father wants his daughter to have choices. Katrina wants to live up to the expectations placed upon her. Jack wants to protect his daughter while remaining intellectually honest. Even characters who behave badly are often pursuing some distorted version of a legitimate human need: recognition, security, love, belonging, or achievement. That complexity gives the novel its humane quality.

At its deepest level, Lords of Serendipity asks what happens when education becomes a commodity instead of a calling. The answer is funny, disturbing, and surprisingly tender. Universities can become businesses, students can become customers, professors can become employees protecting their careers, and parents can become financial investors in their children's futures. But none of those transformations completely erase the original promise of education: the chance to encounter ideas, develop judgment, discover unexpected possibilities, and become more fully human. Boyagoda's novel ultimately suggests that genuine learning is still worth pursuing, but it should not be confused with prestige. The real tragedy is not that people dream of Harvard, Oxford, or other elite universities. It is that they may come to believe there is no meaningful education—or meaningful life—outside those gates. In that tension between ambition and wisdom, sacrifice and exploitation, luck and privilege, Lords of Serendipity becomes a timely and richly comic portrait of the modern educational dream.