Coconuthead is a campus novel told by Lucy Fonua, a young Tongan-Australian woman from Mount Druitt who becomes the first in her family to pursue tertiary education. At Western Sydney University, Lucy enters a strange world of conflicting theories, campus rituals and academic ambition. All the while, she tries desperately to reconcile the seemingly opposing expectations of her home and culture. Although Lucy's studies open her up to new ideas about race, gender, class and liberation; she slowly becomes aware of the limits of institutions that claim to empower women and people of colour but quietly reproduce structures of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy (shout out bell hooks). Throughout her trials of intellect, Lucy is shadowed by an ominous stray cat, an unsettling tutor and a strange third voice that haunts the margins of her story (recalling the “other woman” in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, as well as the marginalia of Sharlene Allsopp’s The Great Undoing). Eventually, a campus tragedy ruptures the world Lucy has craved to belong. Only then does she question what education can actually liberate and exactly who education allows to become "exceptional.” Written with a fictional foreword (inspired by Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire), Coconuthead sees Lucy spin tales of passionate pedagogy, binge drinking, campus echo chambers and a devastating awakening.