Lords of Serendipity

A sharp, hilarious, and deeply moving campus novel about the high-stakes, global obsession with elite education and the lengths parents and students will go to secure their future. Devi is a brilliant village girl in Sri Lanka who dreams of attending Harvard, supported by her toilet-cleaner father and an enigmatic WhatsApp tutor. Meanwhile, in New York, Jack is a burnt-out professor working exhausting overload shifts at a concrete city college to finance his daughter Katrina's dream of attending Haven, an elite New England liberal arts college. When Jack’s slick tech-bro graduate student Allard Hamburger builds a lucrative multimillion-dollar grading-and-cheating empire exploiting terrified international students, their lives collide across continents. From Colombo to Rome to Maine, Lords of Serendipity is a poignant, razor-sharp satire of modern academia, ambition, and the extraordinary sacrifices of family devotion.