As your Gen X relatives probably like to say: the ’90s were, in many ways, a superior decade. Rents were cheaper. Brains weren’t frazzled by TikTok. And the best ’90s books captured a moment in time when people were caught between idealism and ennui, coupled with a growing suspicion that modern life wasn’t all it was cracked up to be (erm, sound familiar?) Indeed, so many ’90s classics still hold up today, thanks to themes that remain relevant some three decades later. To that end, here are the ’90s cult classics worth revisiting – or picking up for the very first time.
American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
Plenty of Bret Easton Ellis’s books could have been on this list – The Informers, Glamorama – but there’s something especially readable about his most famous, American Psycho, which follows a New York investment banker-slash-murderer with a 10-step skincare routine (in those days, such a regimen was a sign of psychopathy, rather than standard practice for your average YouTuber). The film adaptation starring Christian Bale is a classic, but the 1991 novel is even better.
Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel
Wutzel’s 1994 memoir Prozac Nation received mixed reviews upon its release, with one New York Times critic describing it, not inaccurately, as possessing “the raw candour of Joan Didion’s essays, the irritating emotional exhibitionism of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and the wry, dark humour of a Bob Dylan song”. In the decades since, it’s become a beloved and oft-returned to cult text, which also completely altered the way women – especially writers – spoke about depression and mental illness.
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
This is a favourite among my Vogue colleagues, and for good reason. Deliciously alluring and wonderfully stylish, Donna Tartt’s The Secret History is a slow-burn “whydunnit” set in an elite New England college in the mid-1980s. There’s intrigue, there’s murder, and there’s a reason people are still passing around this book today. (Fun fact: the book is inspired by the Vermont college Tartt attended with Easton Ellis.)
Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding
I mean, you don’t need me to tell you what Bridget Jones’s Diary is about – there’s a bronze statue of her (or, Renée Zellweger playing her) in Leicester Square, that’s how important she is to the culture. But I do think it’s worth reading the OG Helen Fielding book if you’ve only ever seen the films (or even if you haven’t). Witty, silly and supremely readable, this canonical text is best enjoyed while alone at home, with some ice cream.
The Beach by Alex Garland
Have you ever dreamt of quitting your hum-drum life to backpack around Thailand and then, ideally, live with a bunch of like-minded others on a secluded beach paradise? No? Then you have not read Alex Garland’s The Beach. The Danny Boyle film did an excellent job of capturing the sun-soaked and then sinister essence of the novel – All Saints soundtrack and all – but there’s nothing like the real thing.
Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto
Yes, Kitchen was released in 1988, but its English translation came out in 1993, so it absolutely counts as an enduring ’90s classic. A tiny slip of a novella, Kitchen follows a young Japanese woman called Mikage Sakurai who is struggling to overcome the death of her grandmother. Over time, she grows close to one of her grandmother’s friends, Yuichi, and ends up staying with him and his transgender mother. Vivid, tragic and poignant in equal measure, there’s no excuse not to have Kitchen on your bookshelf.
Parable of the Sower by Octavia E Butler
Set in 2024 (yes, really!), in a United States that has grown unstable due to climate change, mass inequality and ungovernable corporate greed (yes, also really!), Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower is the sort of novel that everyone should read, even if you’re not usually into sci-fi. As Abby Aguirre put it for The New Yorker: “In the ongoing contest over which dystopian classic is most applicable to our time… for sheer peculiar prescience, Butler’s novel and its sequel may be unmatched.”
Generation X by Douglas Coupland
It doesn’t get more Gen X than this; the novel responsible for the term in the first place (Coupland hated being lumped in with Baby Boomers, so he invented a new name for the then-young people). As for the actual book, it’s about three 20-somethings – Andy, Dag and Claire – who’ve quit their boring careers and decided to live together in Coachella Valley where they drink heavily and work dead-end jobs in the service industry. A slacker manifesto for the ages.
Sex and The City by Candace Bushnell
Long before Sex and The City became our most oft-referenced and beloved TV show, it was a real-life column by Candace Bushnell in the New York Observer, about the writer and her friends dating in their thirties and forties around New York. Eventually, in 1996, her columns were turned into an anthology of the same name and voilà, a zeitgeist-defining juggernaut was born. While so many of the best ’90s books were concerned with big ideas about life and the meaning of it all, Sex and The City was, and is, just so much fun. Best enjoyed alone, at a bar, with a cosmopolitan.
Virtual Light by William Gibson
If you’re new to sci-fi writer William Gibson, I recommend starting with his renowned 1984 novel Neuromancer. But also, his ’90s hits are just as groundbreaking. Virtual Light, the first in his Bridge trilogy, is set in a near-future California (in the ’90s, “near-future” meant 2005), and follows Chevette Washington, a bike messenger who steals a pair of virtual “light glasses” – scarily close to today’s Meta glasses – without realising that they contain valuable data. Ahead of his time, as always.
Paradise by Toni Morrison
I mean, look, it’s worth reading every book by Nobel and Pulitzer prizewinner Toni Morrison, starting with 1970’s The Bluest Eye and then just working your way through the bibliography – at least making sure to read 1987’s Beloved. If we’re talking strictly ’90s, though, then Paradise – non-linear, yet centred around the fictional town of Ruby, a purposefully isolated all-black town in Oklahoma, with a population of just 360 – is the sort of powerful, multi-layered book that’ll remind you why Morrison was one of the best.
The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
Sofia Coppola’s filmic adaptation of this ’90s classic is remarkably faithful to the source material – so much so that, when reading, it can be hard to separate the prose from the pastel-dipped, feverish visuals that you already know. If you’ve for some insane reason not watched the Coppola film, though (and even if you have), it’s worth enjoying Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides in its own right. Bleakly comic, yet dark and mesmerising, it remains one of the defining portraits of suburban American life.
