Back to school season is usually one of buzzy excitement. Teachers and students have full reserves of energy and enthusiasm, classrooms are newly cleaned and decorated, and the wonderful smell of freshly sharpened pencils is in the air. The return to school this  year is more complicated for teachers, staff, students and parents, but it's still a great time for anyone to get back into the swing of learning and, of course, reading!

To mark the occasion of the return to school, we've put together teacher-themed book lists—stories in which the teachers are either the protagonist or an important influence on the main character. In these YA and adult selections, you'll find familiar themes of young teachers struggling to learn the ropes and connect with students and teachers who change the trajector of a student's life with their friendship and guidance, as well as stories that explore teachers' rich interior lives and complicated interpersonal relationships.

Ready to get back into the reading groove? NYPL books can be accessed on our SimplyE app or reserved for pick up at one of our Grab and Go locations. If you're a New York State resident and don't yet have a NYPL library card, you can apply for a digital card via SimplyE.

Young Adult

The Skin I'm In by Sharon Flake

Thirteen-year-old Maleeka, uncomfortable because her skin is extremely dark, meets a new teacher with a birthmark on her face and makes some discoveries about how to love who she is and what she looks like.

 

 

 

 

Bluefish by Pat Schmatz

 

 

 

 

 

The Revenant by Sonia Gensler

When seventeen-year-old Willemina Hammond fakes credentials to get a teaching position at a school for Cherokee girls in nineteenth-century Oklahoma, she is haunted by the ghost of a drowned student.

 

 

 

 

Push by Sapphire

A courageous and determined young teacher opens up a new world of hope and redemption for sixteen-year-old Precious Jones, an abused young African American girl living in Harlem, raped and left pregnant by her father.

 

 

 

 

Anne of Avonlea by Lucy Maud Montgomery

In the charming sequel to Anne of Green Gables, Anne returns to Avonlea to teach in her former school and discovers the pleasures and puzzles of growing up.

 

 

 

 

 

Dear Reader by Mary O'Connell

Seventeen-year-old Flannery Fields seeks her missing teacher in New York City, following clues found in a diary that appears on the teacher's old copy of Wuthering Heights.

 

 

 

 

 

For What It's Worth by Janet Tashjian

Living in Los Angeles' Laurel Canyon neighborhood, fourteen-year-old Quinn's life has been consumed by music and the famous musicians who live nearby, but in 1971, his first girlfriend, a substitute teacher, and a draft dodger help open his eyes about the Vietnam War.

 

 

 

 

Adult Fiction

An Invisible Sign of My Own by Aimee Bender 

Mona Gray, a young second-grade teacher who orders her universe with tidy numbers, finds chaos and romance with an odd new math teacher.

 

 

 

 

The Uncoupling by Meg Wolitzer

In the wake of a drama teacher's decision to direct Lysistrata for the high school play, the women in the town begin to sexually reject their husbands and boyfriends in ways that force both men and women to reevaluate their views on relationships and sexuality.

 

 

 

 

Plainsong by Kent Haruf

From the unsettled lives of a small-town teacher struggling to raise two boys alone in the face of their mother's retreat from life, a pregnant teenage girl with nowhere to go, and two elderly bachelor farmers emerges a new vision of life and family as their diverse destinies intertwine.

 

 

 

The Most Dangerous Place on Earth by Lindsey Lee Johnson

Arriving as a replacement teacher in a privileged Bay Area school, Molly becomes intrigued with the hidden lives and challenging ambitions of her students, who are struggling with a tragedy from their middle-school years.

 

 

 

 

John Woman by Walter Mosley

A young man reinvents himself as a professor to share his late father's wisdom at an unorthodox university, only to encounter fellow intellectuals who have insights into his father's hidden past.

 

 

 

 

Professor Chandra Follows His Bliss by Rajeev Balasubramanyam

An internationally renowned economist and divorced father of three survives an accident before whimsically trading in his high-stress Nobel Prize ambitions to pursue elusive happiness.

 

 

 

 

Outline by Rachel Cusk

Spare and lucid, Outline follows a novelist teaching a course in creative writing over an oppressively hot summer in Athens. She leads her students in storytelling exercises. She meets other visiting writers for dinner. She goes swimming in the Ionian Sea with her neighbor from the plane. The people she encounters speak volubly about themselves: their fantasies, anxieties, pet theories, regrets, and longings. And through these disclosures, a portrait of the narrator is drawn by contrast, a portrait of a woman learning to face a great loss.

 

 

Villette by Charlotte Brontë

Lucy Snowe flees from an unhappy past in England to begin a new file as a teacher at a French boarding school in the great cosmopolitan capital of Villette. Soon Lucy's struggle for independence is overshadowed by both her friendship with a wordly English doctor and her feelings for an autocratic schoolmaster.

 

 

 

 

Stoner by John Williams

Born the child of a poor farmer in Missouri, William Stoner is urged by his parents to study new agriculture techniques at the state university. Digging instead into the texts of Milton and Shakespeare, Stoner falls under the spell of the unexpected pleasures of English literature, and decides to make it his life. Stoner is the story of that life

 

 

 

 

A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines

Grant Wiggins, a college-educated man who returns to his hometown to teach, forms an unlikely bond with Jefferson, a young Black man convicted of murder and sentenced to death, when he is asked to impart his learning and pride to the condemned man.

 

 

 

 

Ms. Hempel Chronicles by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum

Ms. Beatrice Hempel, new to teaching, new to the school, newly engaged, and newly bereft of her idiosyncratic father, struggles to figure out what is expected of her in life and at work.

 

 

 

 

 

Up the Down Staircase by Ben Kaufman

Narrated through a collection of memos, doodles, notes between teachers, and papers from desk drawers and wastebaskets, Up the Down Staircase timelessly depicts the shambolic joys and frustrations of a young teacher.

 

 

 

 

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Sparks

A teacher at a girl's school in Edinburgh during the 1930s comes into conflict with school authorities because of her unorthodox teaching methods.

 

 

 

 

 

Schooled by Anisha Lakhani

Struggling to make ends meet as a poorly paid Manhattan private school teacher, Anna joins an underground circle of nighttime tutors for privileged students and finds herself indoctrinated into her patrons' affluent lifestyles.

 

 

 

 

Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov

Pnin is a professor of Russian at an American college who takes the wrong train to deliver a lecture in a language he cannot master. Pnin is a tireless lover who writes to his treacherous Liza. Pnin is the focal point of subtle academic conspiracies he cannot begin to comprehend, yet he stages a faculty party to end all faculty parties forever.

 

 

 

 

The Secret of Clouds by Alyson Richman

When Yuri Krasny, the boy she is privately tutoring, finally opens up to her, telling the story of his Ukrainian-immigrant parents and the terrible accident that changed their lives forever, English teacher Maggie Topper, inspired by his strength, finds the courage to change her own life.

 

 

 

 

What Was She Thinking? [Notes on a Scandal] by Zoë Heller

When her best friend Sheba Hart's love affair with an underage male student comes to light, igniting a media circus, solitary schoolteacher Barbara Covett decides to write an account of the affair in her friend's defense, in the process revealing not only Sheba's secrets, but also her own.

 

 

 

 

To Sir, With Love by E.R. Braithwaite

With opportunities for black men limited in post World War II London, Rick Braithwaite, a former Royal Air Force pilot and Cambridge-educated engineer, accepts a teaching position that puts him in charge of a class of angry, unmotivated, bigoted white teenagers whom the system has mostly abandoned. When his efforts to reach these troubled students are met with threats, suspicion, and derision, Braithwaite takes a radical new approach. 

 

 

 

Shadow of the Lions by Christopher Swann

Accepting a teaching job at his former school in the wake of a failed writing career, Matthias guiltily reflects on his role in the disappearance of a classmate ten years earlier and becomes compelled to learn the young man's fate.

 

 

 

 

The English Teacher by Lily King

A single mother has sheltered her son for many years at the private school where she works as an English teacher, but she is beginning to unravel as secrets from her past catch up with her.

 

 

 

 

The Summer Before the War by Helen Simonson

Arriving in the village of Rye, England, in 1914, Beatrice Nash, a young woman of good family, becomes the first female teacher of Latin at the local school and falls in love with her sponsor's nephew.

 

 

 

 

 

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Staff picks are chosen by NYPL staff members and are not intended to be comprehensive lists. We'd love to hear your ideas too, so leave a comment and tell us what you’d recommend. And check out our Staff Picks browse tool for more recommendations!

Summaries provided via NYPL’s catalog, which draws from multiple sources. Click through to each book’s title for more.