The Floating Campus of 1925
A Novel of Class and Learning at Sea

About this book:

On the S.S. *Artemis*, the lecture hall is a converted dining saloon, the library hums with the ship's engines, and the campus is a luxury liner circling the globe. It's 1925, and the International University Society has launched a bold experiment: a floating campus where the sons of industrial magnates study political economy beside scholarship students who wait their tables and tally their coal consumption. For Julian Vance, Boston-bred and Harvard-polished, the voyage promises nine months of intellectual adventure and freedom from Prohibition-era constraints. For Evelyn Reed, a machinist's daughter from Philadelphia with a work-study grant and a sociologist's eye, it's a chance to document the machinery of class from inside its gilded hull.

But the *Artemis* carries more than textbooks and ambition. Below the waterline, crew quarters and engine rooms pulse with the labor that keeps the intellectual project afloat. Professor Pendelton assigns Adam Smith on the upper decks while Dr. Thorne tasks Evelyn with measuring caloric intake across the ship's rigid strata. Smuggled manifestos circulate in the galley. A mutiny of thought brews at the thirtieth parallel. And as the liner crosses meridians and equators, the careful boundaries between decks begin to fracture—revealing that a ship at sea is no escape from the world, but its most concentrated distillation.

*The Floating Campus of 1925* is a novel of ideas set against the rhythm of the Atlantic, where every seminar is shadowed by the stokehold, every promenade enforces a hierarchy, and the most dangerous knowledge isn't found in the syllabus. For readers who love the atmospheric tension of *The Rules of Civility* and the structural daring of *The Passenger*, this voyage asks what happens when a floating ivory tower meets the ocean's indifferent depths—and who gets to decide what an education is worth.