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A Novel
Mariner Books
September 2026
On Sale: September 8, 2026
352 pages
ISBN: 0063474859
EAN: 9780063474857
Kindle: B0G5NJBQT3
Hardcover / e-Book
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Fiction Literary
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 lifestyle. 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.
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