As your Gen X relatives probably like to regularly mention: 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.
Plenty of Bret Easton Ellis’s books could have been on this list – , but there’s something especially readable and beguiling about his most famous, , 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.
Wutzel’s 1994 memoir received mixed reviews upon its release, with one critic describing it, not inaccurately, as possessing “the raw candour of Joan Didion’s essays, the irritating emotional exhibitionism of Sylvia Plath’s 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.
Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel
This is a favourite among my colleagues, and for good reason. Deliciously alluring and wonderfully stylish, Donna Tartt’s is a slow-burn “whydunnit” set in an elite New England college in the mid-1980s (I mean, read it for the atmosphere and style as much for the plot). 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.)
I mean, you don’t need me to tell you what 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.
Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding
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 perhaps you haven’t read Alex Garland’s , which tells the tale of a young traveller living in utopia with other young travellers – at least, it starts out that way. The Danny Boyle film did an excellent job of capturing the sun-soaked and then darkly sinister essence of the novel – All Saints soundtrack and all – but there’s nothing like the original text.
The Beach by Alex Garland
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 : “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.”
Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
It doesn’t get more Gen X than this; the novel responsible for the term in the first place (Coupland resented being lumped in with Baby Boomers, so he invented a new name for the then-young people, which clearly stuck). 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 , 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 , 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.
Sex and The City by Candace Bushnell
If you’re new to sci-fi writer William Gibson, I recommend starting with his renowned 1984 novel . But also, his ’90s hits are just as groundbreaking. , the first in his 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.
Virtual Light by William Gibson
I mean, look, it’s worth reading every book by Nobel and Pulitzer prizewinner Toni Morrison, starting with 1970’s and then just working your way through the bibliography – at least making sure to read 1987’s . If we’re talking strictly ’90s, though, then – 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.
Paradise by Toni Morrison
Yes, was released in 1988, but its English translation hit the UK shelves and imagination in 1993, so I’m counting this as an enduring ’90s classic. A tiny slip of a novella, 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 on your bookshelf.
Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto
Before was a David Fincher movie starring an extremely cut Brad Pitt, it was a wry Chuck Palahniuk novel about an unnamed protagonist struggling with insomnia. If you’ve seen the film, you’ll know that our protagonist eventually meets a good-looking, charismatic guy who goes by the name of Tyler Durden, with the two of them starting an underground “fight club” as a radical form of psychotherapy – and, eventually, as a way to spread anti-consumerist views in the process. I mean, look, it doesn’t get more ’90s than this.
Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
Winner of the 1997 Booker Prize, Arundhati Roy’s debut novel The God of Small Things – set in Ayemenem, a small town in Kerala, India – follows two seven-year-old twins, Estha and Rahel, whose lives are upended after their mother has a secret love affair with an “untouchable” carpenter and violates India’s caste rules, followed by the tragic drowning of their cousin soon after. Poetically written and beautifully plotted – and with a non-linear structure that sees the twins reunite as adults after their estrangement – The God of Small Things is about how tiny, personal moments can collide with big, destructive political forces.
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
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’ in its own right. Bleakly comic, yet dark and mesmerising, it remains one of the defining portraits of suburban American life and teenagedom.
The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
The ’90s were a decade in which people were quite obsessed with imagining apocalyptic futures (now we’re living in an apocalyptic world, such texts seem to have dried up a little). And – named after the white static that used to appear on early Macintosh computers when they broke down – is a cult classic of the cyberpunk genre. Set in a near-future LA where the government has lost power and private corporations and criminal networks run everything, the novel follows a pizza delivery driver and a 15-year-old skateboarder who form an alliance to investigate a new cyberdrug in the Metaverse (yes, this is where the term came from, and yes, it makes sense when you read it).
