Abroad

Not since Donna Tartt's The Secret History has a novel this intoxicating captured the headiness and dark temptations of university life.

The old Etruscan city of Grifonia swarms with year-abroad students—thousands of them from all over. Ostensibly, they've come to study. But really they are here to reinvent themselves, to shuck their identities and buck constraints far from the watchful eyes of parents and others who know them too well. There's a reason Henry James's young ladies went to E...