Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Best Books of 1992
In February 1992 Hamish Hamilton published Barry Unsworth’s novel about a Liverpool slave ship, and that year it shared the Booker Prize with a Canadian novel about four people in a ruined Italian villa — after which the rules were changed so the prize could not be split again, until 2019. In September Knopf gave a first novel about six classics students in Vermont a first printing of 75,000 copies, when a debut usually got about 10,000. In Rome a small press published a first novel by a writer who signed herself Elena Ferrante. And a book of folk tales and Jungian analysis began a run of 145 weeks on the New York Times list. These eight are the books first published in 1992 that I still hand to people.
By Lisanne Swart · 8 books · Fiction & Nonfiction · All first published in 1992
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The Secret History
Richard Papen arrives at Hampden College, an invented liberal-arts college in Vermont, and falls in with the five students who study classics under a single eccentric professor, Julian Morrow. The novel opens by telling you that one of them is dead and that the others killed him. Everything that follows is the story of how they got there — and how Richard, who was not present for the first death, became complicit in the second. Tartt spent eight years on it, and it grew out of her own years studying classics at Bennington. Knopf gave it a first printing of 75,000 copies. It is the founding text of what is now called dark academia, and it is better than most of what has come after it.
What makes The Secret History last is not the murder plot but the atmosphere — the cold Vermont winters, the particular intoxication of studying ancient Greek with a man who believes it will change how you see the world, the seductiveness of a closed world with its own rules. Tartt understood something her many imitators have missed: the darkness has to be earned. The beauty of the world these students inhabit is real, which is what makes its corruption devastating.
The English Patient
At the end of the Second World War, a ruined Italian villa holds four people: Hana, a young Canadian nurse, tending a burned, unidentified man; Kip, a Sikh sapper from India clearing mines from the surrounding countryside; and Caravaggio, a thief turned intelligence agent. The burned man — the English patient of the title — has no past that anyone can verify and a voice that draws the others toward him. The novel moves between the villa and his remembered life in the North African desert, between war and the time before it. It shared the Booker Prize in 1992, won the Governor General’s Award, and on 8 July 2018, in a public vote marking the prize’s fiftieth year, it was named the Golden Man Booker.
Ondaatje writes prose that works more like poetry than like conventional fiction — images accumulate and repeat, meaning arrives sideways, time is not linear. The English Patient asks what it means to be a person without a country, to love across the borders that nations draw through landscapes and through people. It has not stopped being contemporary.
Sacred Hunger
The Liverpool Merchant sails from England to the coast of Africa in the eighteenth century to buy enslaved people for the Caribbean, and Unsworth follows the ship, its crew and the merchant family that financed it through what the trade makes of every one of them. It shared the Booker Prize of 1992 with The English Patient; afterwards the Booker changed its rules so that only one book could win, a rule that held until 2019. Its sequel, The Quality of Mercy, in 2011, was his last novel.
The half of the 1992 Booker that most readers have forgotten, and the one that has aged best as an argument: a novel about profit, written with the moral clarity of someone who refuses to let the reader stand outside it.
Poor Things
Bella Baxter was a young woman found drowned. The surgeon Godwin Baxter brought her back to life by implanting the brain of her unborn child into her adult body. Bella grows — rapidly, voraciously, without the socialisation that shapes most women into accepting the world as it is — and sets out to understand everything: sex, money, politics, poverty, the way men behave when they think they are unobserved. Gray presents it all as a Victorian document, complete with competing accounts and a letter from Bella herself that disputes the story. It won the Whitbread Novel Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1992, and Yorgos Lanthimos’s film of 2023, with Emma Stone, won the Golden Lion at Venice and four Oscars.
Poor Things is a feminist fable told in the form of a Victorian pastiche, which is a more complicated and more interesting thing than it might sound. Bella is not a victim waiting to be rescued and she is not a fantasy of female liberation — she is a person who has been given, accidentally, the chance to encounter the world without the accumulated deformations that society imposes on girls. The answer to what she might become is both funnier and stranger than you expect.
All the Pretty Horses
Sixteen-year-old John Grady Cole leaves Texas on horseback and rides into Mexico, into work on a hacienda, a love he is not allowed, and a violence he did not expect. It is the first book of McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, followed by The Crossing, and it won both the National Book Award for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Billy Bob Thornton filmed it in 2000.
The most accessible door into McCarthy: the prose is as strange and biblical as ever, but the story is a coming-of-age that moves, and John Grady is the most sympathetic character he ever wrote.
Leviathan
A writer named Peter Aaron is trying to reconstruct the life of his friend Benjamin Sachs, who blew himself up by a road in northern Wisconsin while building a bomb. As the anonymous “Phantom of Liberty”, Sachs had been blowing up small replicas of the Statue of Liberty across America, and the FBI wants to know why. Aaron’s account moves back through Sachs’s life — his marriage, his affairs, his change from celebrated novelist to anonymous political actor — to understand a man who chose to become someone else. In Christine Le Boeuf’s French translation it won the Prix Médicis étranger in 1993.
Auster at his best: the metafictional machinery is present but kept below the human story, the prose is clear and propulsive, and the central question is difficult — what does it mean to commit to a political act whose logic you follow but whose cost you cannot fully accept?
Troubling Love
Delia’s mother, Amalia, has been found drowned, and Delia returns to Naples for the funeral and begins, almost despite herself, to reconstruct her mother’s last days. What she finds does not fit the mother she thought she knew. L’amore molesto was Ferrante’s first novel, published in Rome by Edizioni e/o; it won the Premio Procida-Isola di Arturo-Elsa Morante, was nominated for the Premio Strega and was filmed by Mario Martone in 1995. English readers had to wait for Ann Goldstein’s translation, Troubling Love, in 2006. It is now read as the first version of what she would build in the Neapolitan novels: mothers and daughters, the weight of Naples, and the men who move through women’s lives.
Ferrante’s prose in translation feels immediate and interior without becoming claustrophobic. Troubling Love is short and moves fast, but it is not simple. The mystery at its centre is not really what happened to Amalia: it is what Delia does not know about her own history, and what she has chosen not to know.
Women Who Run with the Wolves
Clarissa Pinkola Estés is a Jungian psychoanalyst and, in her own word, a cantadora, a keeper of the old stories in the Latina oral tradition. The book grew out of her recordings of those stories, and its argument runs through all of them — from Bluebeard to La Llorona to Vasalisa to Skeleton Woman: that there is a wild, instinctive nature in women that culture systematically suppresses, and that recovering it is not optional but necessary. It spent 145 weeks on the New York Times list, a record at the time, and made Estés the first Latina author on that list.
This is not a book you read in a sitting. It is a book you move through slowly, putting it down when something lands and picking it up when you are ready for the next thing. Estés does not write like an academic and she does not write like a self-help author — she writes like someone who has spent a long time with stories and knows what they can do that argument cannot.
Where to begin with the best of 1992
If you want the most compulsively readable book
→ The Secret History by Donna Tartt. It started a genre and is still better than everything it spawned.
If you want the most beautiful prose
→ The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje. He writes like a poet who decided to try fiction and never looked back.
If you want the most inventive and feminist book
→ Poor Things by Alasdair Gray. On my shelf, and a question about women and freedom that remains entirely current.
If you want the Booker winner nobody remembers
→ Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth, the other half of 1992’s shared prize.
If you want something that will change how you think
→ Women Who Run with the Wolves — but give it time. It is not a book to rush.
Books first published in 1992
Nineteen more books whose first publication genuinely falls in 1992, for when you want breadth rather than a recommendation.
Hideous Kinky
Esther Freud · Hamish Hamilton, 30 January
A childhood in Morocco, told by the younger of two sisters. Her first novel.
Bastard Out of Carolina
National Book Award finalist
Dorothy Allison · Dutton, March
A girl growing up in Greenville, South Carolina. Her first novel.
Jazz
Toni Morrison · Knopf, 21 April
Harlem in the 1920s, the year before her Nobel Prize.
The Butcher Boy
Booker shortlist
Patrick McCabe · Picador, April
A boy in a small Irish town comes apart. Neil Jordan filmed it in 1997.
Fatherland
Robert Harris · Hutchinson, 7 May
A detective story in a Europe where Germany won the war. His first novel.
Waiting to Exhale
Terry McMillan · Viking, 28 May
Four friends in Phoenix, and the novel that became the 1995 film with Whitney Houston and Angela Bassett.
Snow Crash
Neal Stephenson · Bantam, June
The novel that gave us the word “metaverse”.
Lost in the City
National Book Award finalist
Edward P. Jones · William Morrow, 16 June
Fourteen stories of Black Washington, D.C., modelled on Dubliners. His first book.
Black Dogs
Booker shortlist
Ian McEwan · Jonathan Cape, 1 July
A short novel of post-war Europe and a marriage split by two ways of seeing it.
Dolores Claiborne
Best seller of 1992
Stephen King · Viking, November
A woman suspected of murder tells her own story, in one continuous monologue.
The Bridges of Madison County
Robert James Waller · Warner Books
It entered the New York Times list in August 1992 and stayed for 164 weeks.
Dreaming in Cuban
National Book Award finalist
Cristina García · Knopf
Three generations of a Cuban family, split by the revolution. Her first novel.
Possessing the Secret of Joy
Alice Walker · Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
A novel about female genital cutting, and a character from The Color Purple.
The Volcano Lover
Susan Sontag · Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Sir William Hamilton, Emma Hamilton and Nelson in Naples.
A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain
Pulitzer Prize 1993
Robert Olen Butler · Henry Holt
Stories of Vietnamese immigrants in Louisiana.
Truman
Pulitzer Prize 1993
David McCullough · Simon & Schuster
The life of Harry S. Truman.
Becoming a Man
National Book Award 1992
Paul Monette · Harcourt
“Half a life story”: a memoir of growing up gay in mid-century America.
The End of History and the Last Man
Francis Fukuyama · Free Press
The book-length version of his 1989 essay.
Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus
John Gray · HarperCollins
More than fifteen million copies sold.
First books published in 1992
The writers who arrived in 1992 — and the difference between a first book and a first novel, which is where most lists go wrong.
The Secret History
Donna Tartt
Her first book and her first novel.
Troubling Love
Elena Ferrante
Her first novel.
Lost in the City
Edward P. Jones
His first book, a collection of stories.
Hideous Kinky
Esther Freud
Her first novel. She had trained as an actress.
Dreaming in Cuban
Cristina García
Her first novel.
Bastard Out of Carolina
Dorothy Allison
Her first novel, not her first book: stories and poems came before it.
Fatherland
Robert Harris
His first novel, not his first book: he had been publishing nonfiction since 1982.
1992 in books, in short
- Nobel Prize
- Derek Walcott, announced on 8 October 1992, “for a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment”
- Booker Prize
- Shared by The English Patient and Sacred Hunger. The shortlist also held Serenity House (Christopher Hope), The Butcher Boy (Patrick McCabe), Black Dogs (Ian McEwan) and Daughters of the House (Michèle Roberts). Poor Things was not on it. Afterwards the rules were changed so that only one book could win — a rule broken again in 2019
- National Book Awards
- All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy for fiction and Becoming a Man by Paul Monette for nonfiction
- Pulitzer, fiction
- A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley — a book of 1991, published on 23 October that year. The fiction Pulitzer for a book of 1992 went in 1993 to A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain by Robert Olen Butler
- Whitbread
- Book of the Year: Swing Hammer Swing! by Jeff Torrington, which also won the first novel award. The novel award went to Poor Things
- Prix Goncourt
- Texaco by Patrick Chamoiseau
- Best seller
- Dolores Claiborne by Stephen King was the best-selling novel of the year in America; The Bridges of Madison County was the one that would not leave the list
The prize year is not the publication year. The fiction Pulitzer handed out in 1992 went to a book of 1991, and the one for a book of 1992 came in 1993. And the most famous prize of 1992, the shared Booker, is also the most often misremembered: Poor Things won the Whitbread Novel Award that year, not the Booker.
Frequently asked questions about the best books of 1992
What were the best books published in 1992?
The books first published in 1992 that have lasted include The Secret History by Donna Tartt, The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje and Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth, which shared the Booker Prize, Poor Things by Alasdair Gray, All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy, Leviathan by Paul Auster, Elena Ferrante’s first novel, Troubling Love, and Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés. This list covers the titles that, in my reading, best reward the time spent with them.
Who won the Booker Prize in 1992?
Two books shared it: The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje and Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth. After the tie the Booker changed its rules so that only one book could win, a rule that held until 2019. In 2018 The English Patient was voted the Golden Man Booker, the best winner of the prize’s first fifty years.
Did Poor Things win the Booker Prize?
No, and it was not on the 1992 shortlist. Poor Things by Alasdair Gray won the Whitbread Novel Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1992. An earlier version of this page said it had won the Booker; the Booker that year was shared by The English Patient and Sacred Hunger.
Did The Secret History win any awards?
The Secret History did not win a major prize, but Knopf gave it a first printing of 75,000 copies, when a debut usually got about 10,000, and it became the founding text of dark academia. Donna Tartt’s second novel, The Little Friend, came out ten years later, in 2002; her third, The Goldfinch, was published in 2013 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 2014.
What is The English Patient about?
The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje is set in a ruined Italian villa at the end of the Second World War. A burned, unidentified man — the English patient of the title — is tended by Hana, a Canadian nurse, while Kip, a Sikh sapper, and Caravaggio, a thief turned intelligence agent, share the house. The novel moves between the villa and the man’s past in the North African desert. It shared the Booker Prize in 1992.
What is Poor Things about?
Poor Things by Alasdair Gray is a Victorian feminist fable about Bella Baxter, a drowned woman brought back to life by a surgeon who implants the brain of her unborn child in her adult body. Bella sets out to understand the world on her own terms. Gray presents the story as a Victorian document with competing accounts, including Bella’s own letter disputing it. Yorgos Lanthimos filmed it in 2023 with Emma Stone.
Is Women Who Run with the Wolves worth reading?
Yes, if you give it time. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, a Jungian psychoanalyst and cantadora, uses folk tales and fairy tales to recover what she calls the Wild Woman archetype — the instinctive, creative, knowing nature that culture works to suppress. It is not a quick read, but for readers willing to move through it slowly it offers a vocabulary for things that are otherwise very difficult to name. It spent 145 weeks on the New York Times list.
Which writers published their first novel in 1992?
Donna Tartt, with The Secret History, Elena Ferrante, with L’amore molesto, later translated as Troubling Love, Esther Freud, with Hideous Kinky, and Cristina García, with Dreaming in Cuban. Edward P. Jones published his first book, the stories of Lost in the City. Two to be careful with: Dorothy Allison and Robert Harris published first novels in 1992 but had published books before.
Footnotes
The Secret History 3 facts
Knopf published it on 16 September 1992, with a first printing of 75,000 against the usual 10,000 for a debut.
Tartt spent eight years on it, and it grew out of her time studying classics at Bennington. This page said she wrote it in her twenties; the eight years are what can be sourced.correction
This page said The Little Friend came eleven years later. It came out in 2002, ten years later; The Goldfinch was published in 2013 and won the Pulitzer in 2014.correction
The English Patient 4 facts
McClelland & Stewart published it in September 1992; it won the Governor General’s Award. Hana is a Canadian nurse, Kip a Sikh sapper, Caravaggio a thief turned intelligence agent.
It shared the Booker Prize of 1992 with Sacred Hunger.
It was named the Golden Man Booker on 8 July 2018, after a public vote marking fifty years of the prize.
Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient wins the Golden Man Booker Prize — Ransom Center Magazine
Anthony Minghella’s film won nine Oscars.
Sacred Hunger 2 facts
Hamish Hamilton published it on 27 February 1992; the ship is the Liverpool Merchant; its sequel, The Quality of Mercy, came in 2011.
After the shared prize of 1992 the Booker allowed only one winner, until 2019.
Poor Things 4 facts
Bloomsbury published it on 3 September 1992.
Poor Things: Alasdair Gray’s postmodern classic — National Library of Scotland
This page, in the introduction and the FAQ, said Poor Things won the Booker Prize. It did not, and it was not on the 1992 shortlist. It won the Whitbread Novel Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize.correction
The 1992 Booker shortlist, without Poor Things.correction
This page said Bella was found drowned in the Clyde. The sources say only that she drowned, so the river is gone. Lanthimos’s film won the Golden Lion and four Oscars.correction
All the Pretty Horses 2 facts
Knopf published it in May 1992; it won the National Book Critics Circle Award, begins the Border Trilogy, and John Grady Cole is sixteen.
It won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1992.
Leviathan 3 facts
Viking published it in 1992. Peter Aaron narrates; Benjamin Sachs dies by a road in northern Wisconsin while building a bomb; as the Phantom of Liberty he blew up replicas of the Statue of Liberty. This page said he was found in a field.correction
In Christine Le Boeuf’s translation it won the Prix Médicis étranger in 1993.
The introduction said many consider it Auster’s finest novel. I could not source that, so it is gone.correction
Troubling Love 1 fact
Edizioni e/o published L’amore molesto in 1992; it was Ferrante’s first novel. This page said it was largely overlooked. It won the Premio Procida-Isola di Arturo-Elsa Morante, was nominated for the Strega and was filmed by Mario Martone in 1995; Ann Goldstein’s English translation followed in 2006.correction
Women Who Run with the Wolves 2 facts
Ballantine published it in 1992; it spent 145 weeks on the New York Times list and grew out of Estés’s recorded stories. This page said she spent twenty years collecting them and that the book has never been out of print; I could not source either, so both are gone.correction
Estés is a Jungian psychoanalyst and calls herself a cantadora.
1992 in books 9 facts
Derek Walcott’s Nobel Prize was announced on 8 October 1992, with the citation quoted on this page.
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1992, press release — NobelPrize.org
A Thousand Acres won the fiction Pulitzer of 1992.
It was published on 23 October 1991.
A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain won the fiction Pulitzer of 1993.
Becoming a Man won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1992.
Swing Hammer Swing! was the Whitbread Book of the Year for 1992.
Texaco won the Prix Goncourt of 1992.
Dolores Claiborne was the best-selling novel of 1992 in America.
The Bridges of Madison County entered the list in August 1992 and stayed for 164 weeks.
First books 5 facts
Hideous Kinky was Esther Freud’s first novel.
Bastard Out of Carolina was Dorothy Allison’s first novel.
Dreaming in Cuban was Cristina García’s first novel.
Lost in the City was Edward P. Jones’s first book.
Robert Harris had published nonfiction since 1982.
Last verified 26 September 2026. Everything marked “correction” above is a place where this page said something different before. The one that mattered: Poor Things did not win the Booker Prize and was not on its shortlist — the 1992 Booker was shared by The English Patient and Sacred Hunger, which is now on this page. Ferrante’s first novel was not overlooked in Italy, The Little Friend came ten years after The Secret History, not eleven, and three claims I could not source have gone. Where a source contradicts the version that circulates, the source wins. Anything I could not source to a named publisher, prize body, archive, library record, newspaper or reference work is not on this page. Where a Wikipedia article is the source, that is what the footnote says.
The notes on this page are all mine,
and the books are all theirs.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. See more on her personal bookshelf.
Where to go next
Pages on this site that pick up where 1992 leaves off.
If you liked
Books Like Poor Things
Unreliable narrators, feminist rewrites, and literary invention.
Genre
Best Nonfiction Books
The nonfiction titles that are worth your time.
Genre
Best Fiction Books of All Time
The novels that changed what fiction could do.
Overview
Best Books by Year
Browse all the reading lists, year by year.
The Nobel citation of 1992
“For a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment.” — The Swedish Academy, on Derek Walcott
If this list resonated with you, you’ll find more books like these on my personal bookshelf — hand-picked for readers who want books that stay with them long after the last page.
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