Changing Places: a Tale of Two Campuses Lodge David

Two English professors, two universities, an exchange that goes spectacularly sideways. Philip Swallow leaves grey, drizzly England for the sun-soaked chaos of 1960s California. Morris Zapp trades American confidence for British reserve and finds neither suits him. What starts as a six-month academic swap becomes a full-blown life exchange — wives, beds, careers, identities all up for grabs. David Lodge writes campus satire with surgical precision, skewering academic pomposity while staying genuinely warm toward his characters. It's clever without being smug, laugh-out-loud funny without losing its bite. The parallel narratives switch perspectives mid-sentence, a formal trick that shouldn't work but absolutely does. For anyone who's spent time around universities, survived culture shock, or wondered what happens when you step into someone else's life and find it fits better than your own.