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The University of Babylon

Academic life, institutional absurdity and the people who somehow keep it functioning.

About the book

Start the conversation

The University of Babylon follows HR Director Sheldon Michaels through eleven months in a metropolitan university where bureaucracy is elaborate, decisions are provisional and the Vice Chancellor believes someone is trying to kill him.

For book clubs, the novel offers both comedy and recognition: leadership, workplace behaviour, ambition, institutional politics, compliance, loyalty and the gap between what organisations say they do and what actually happens inside them.

View the bookMeet Sheldon Michaels

Themes

Ideas to explore

  • Leadership and institutional politics
  • Bureaucracy and compliance
  • Workplace behaviour and professional identity
  • Power, reputation and self-preservation
  • Satire, exaggeration and uncomfortable recognition

Discussion guide

Questions for your book club

Use these as a starting point, choose the ones that interest your group, or simply let the conversation go where the book takes you.

  1. Which character would you least like to work for — and which would you most trust in a crisis?
  2. How much of the university’s dysfunction comes from individuals, and how much from the system itself?
  3. Is Sheldon primarily cynical, realistic or complicit?
  4. Where does the novel move from comic exaggeration into something recognisably true about organisations?
  5. Which meeting, policy or bureaucratic episode felt most familiar to you?
  6. How does status affect the way characters behave when something goes wrong?
  7. Does the Vice Chancellor’s fear make him more perceptive or less reliable?
  8. If you could remove one institutional habit from the University of Babylon, what would it be?

Stories & extras

Beyond The University of Babylon

Alongside the novel, this area will collect short pieces of 350–1,000 words about its people, locations, incidents and the realities of university life that sit behind the satire. These pieces will also form a bank of material for Ambessa newsletters, Facebook and Instagram.

Stories are being prepared for this section. The first pieces will explore characters, locations and incidents from the world behind the novel.

For organisers

Reading this with a group?

Ambessa will be developing downloadable discussion material, background features and opportunities for book clubs to send in questions. Join the newsletter to hear when new resources and stories are published.

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