An Expensive Education

Professor Susan Lowell has it made. A happily married mother of two in a tenure-track job at Harvard, she has just won a Pulitzer Prize for her book lionizing Hatashil, an East African freedom fighter. David Ayan is her singular Somali-born student. He is trying to become a member of one of Harvard’s elite finals clubs. He is trying to understand Jane, his girlfriend from a privileged background. He is trying, sometimes, just to get by in a foreign place. Michael Teak is a twenty-five-year-old recent Harvard grad working as an American intelligence operative who meets Hatashil in David’s village minutes before the massacre that will upend all their lives. Nick McDonell’s third novel takes his readers into Harvard—through its dormitories and dining halls, into its elite finals clubs and lecture halls, and within the offices of its ambitious professors—giving us an incredibly authentic insider’s view of this illustrious university. A powerful portrait of personalities all ensnared in the African conflict and of the Harvard campus on which the debate takes place, An Expensive Education is a smart, relentless novel set at the troubled intersection of ivory academia and realpolitik.