Historical Fiction Set in the 1990s

The year is 1995, and email is new. Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives for her freshman year at Harvard. At the end of the school year, Selin heads to the Hungarian countryside to teach English and embarks on a journey further inside herself: A coming to grips with the ineffable and exhilarating confusion of first love, and with the growing consciousness that she is doomed to become a writer. With superlative emotional and intellectual sensitivity, mordant wit, and pitch-perfect style, Batuman dramatizes the uncertainty of life on the cusp of adulthood. The Idiot is a heroic yet self-effacing reckoning with the terror and joy of becoming a person in a world that is as intoxicating as it is disquieting.

No ‘90s nostalgia list would be complete without rom-coms! Becky Bloomwood has a fabulous flat in London’s trendiest neighborhood, a troupe of glamorous socialite friends, and a closet brimming with the season’s must-haves. The only trouble is, she can’t actually afford it — not any of it. Her job writing at Successful Saving magazine not only bores her to tears, but it also doesn’t pay much at all. But when a story arises that Becky actually cares about, her front-page article will set off a chain of events that will transform her life — and the lives of those around her — forever.

From the bestselling author of Everything I Never Told You and Our Missing Hearts comes a riveting novel that traces the intertwined fates of the picture-perfect Richardson family and the enigmatic mother and daughter who upend their lives. Little Fires Everywhere explores the weight of secrets, the nature of art and identity, and the ferocious pull of motherhood — and the danger of believing that following the rules can avert disaster.

As the twentieth century draws to a close, Maria is at the start of a life she never thought possible. She and Khalil, her college sweetheart, are planning their wedding. They live together in a black bohemian enclave in Brooklyn and even landed a starring role in a documentary about “new people” like them, who are blurring the old boundaries as a brave new era dawns. But, Maria can’t stop daydreaming about another man, a poet she barely knows. As fantasy escalates to fixation, it dredges up secrets from the past and threatens to unravel not only Maria’s perfect life but her very persona. Heartbreaking and darkly comic, New People is a bold and unfettered page-turner that challenges our every assumption about how we define one another, and ourselves.

It’s 1992 and fifteen-year-old Eugenia is rudely yanked from her old life by her filmmaker parents who dream of fame and fortune. They settle in the strange, suburban world of the San Fernando Valley, forcing Eugenia to navigate the unfamiliar terrain of the LA high school experience — a world of gang rivalries and all-night-raves, fast food, and sneakers. But the angst, ecstasy, and self-discovery of adolescence endure, no matter the backdrop.

Will Freeman may have discovered the key to dating success: Single mothers — bright, attractive, available women — thousands of them, all over London. He just had to find them. SPAT: Single Parents – Alone Together. It was a brilliant plan. And Will wasn’t going to let the fact that he didn’t have a child hold him back. A fictional two-year-old wouldn’t be the first thing he’d invented. And it seems to go quite well at first, until he meets an actual twelve-year-old named Marcus, who is more than Will bargained for …

Sam and Sadie — two college friends, often in love, but never lovers — become creative partners in a dazzling and intricately imagined world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality. It is a love story, but not one you have read before.

Bursting with bittersweet nostalgia, a funny, poignant, perfectly voiced debut that captures what it’s like to be a teenage girl — “full of brilliantly-rendered awkwardness and the hilarious minor horrors of a privileged adolescence, The Brittanys shimmers with the everyday incandescence of youth” (Kimberly King Parsons, author of Black Light).

“An epic adventure about a female athlete perhaps past her prime, brought back to the tennis court for one last grand slam” (Elle), from the author of Malibu Rising, Daisy Jones & The Six, and The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo.

On the eve of her fortieth birthday, Alice’s life isn’t terrible. She likes her job, is happy with her apartment, her romantic status, and her independence. But her father is ailing, and it feels to her as if something is missing. When she wakes up the next morning, she finds herself back in 1996, reliving her sixteenth birthday. But it isn’t just her adolescent body that shocks her, or seeing her high school crush — it’s her dad, the vital, charming, forty-something version of her father with whom she is reunited. Now armed with a new perspective on her own life and his, some past events take on new meaning. Is there anything that she would change if she could?

In 1997, grunge is king, Titanic is a blockbuster (and Blockbuster still exists), and Thursday nights are for Friends. In Bellport, Connecticut, four best friends and high school seniors are ready to light the world on fire. Melissa Levin, Priya Chowdhury, Tara Taylor, and Suki Hammer are going places. Their yearbook superlatives confirm it: Most Likely to Win the White House, Cure Cancer, Open a Michelin-Starred Restaurant, and Join the Forbes 400. At their milestone high school reunion, a group of friends makes a pact to finally achieve their high school superlatives one way or another, in the lively new novel.

In the vein of Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones and Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees, a coming-of-age novel told by almost-eleven-year-old Kenyatta Bernice (KB), as she and her sister try to make sense of their new life with their estranged grandfather in the wake of their father’s death and their mother’s disappearance. A dazzling and moving novel about family, identity, and race, What the Fireflies Knew poignantly reveals that heartbreaking but necessary component of growing up — the realization that loved ones can be flawed and that the perfect family we all dream of looks different up close.

Romantic comedy’s iconic Bridget Jones’s Diary is the devastatingly self-aware, laugh-out-loud account of a year in the life of a thirty-something Singleton on a permanently doomed quest for self-improvement. With a blend of flighty charm, existential gloom, and endearing self-deprecation, this book has touched a raw nerve with millions of readers around the world. Read it and laugh — before you cry, “Bridget Jones is me!”