The Best Books of 1992

The Secret History

Donna Tartt  ·  1992

Richard Papen arrives at Hampden College in Vermont and falls in with a small group of classics students who study under a single eccentric professor. 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 murder, became complicit in the second. Tartt wrote this in her twenties and published it as her debut. 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 that has its own rules. Tartt understood something that 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

Michael Ondaatje  ·  1992

At the end of the Second World War, a ruined Italian villa contains four people: a Canadian nurse tending a burned, unidentified man; a Sikh sapper clearing mines from the surrounding countryside; and a thief turned intelligence operative named Caravaggio. 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 present and his remembered life in the North African desert, between war and the time before war, between borders claimed and borders crossed. It won the Booker Prize in 1992 and was voted the Golden Man Booker — best Booker winner of the last fifty years — in 2018.

Ondaatje writes prose that operates more like poetry than like conventional fiction — images accumulate and repeat, meaning arrives sideways rather than directly, 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 was written in the early 1990s and it has not stopped being contemporary.

Poor Things

Alasdair Gray  ·  1992

Bella Baxter was a young woman found drowned in the river Clyde. 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 socialization 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 this as a Victorian document, complete with competing accounts and an editor’s introduction that casts everything into doubt. It won the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Novel Award in 1992 and was adapted into a film in 2023.

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. Gray is asking what a woman might become if those deformations were removed. The answer is both funnier and stranger than you expect.

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Women Who Run with the Wolves

Clarissa Pinkola Estés  ·  1992

Clarissa Pinkola Estés spent twenty years collecting the folklore, fairy tales, and myths she uses in this book — stories from the Mestiza oral tradition, from Eastern European villages, from the Jungian analytic tradition. The argument running through all of them is that there is a wild, instinctual nature in women that culture systematically suppresses, and that recovering it is not optional but necessary. Estés is both a Jungian analyst and a cantadora — a keeper of stories — and she brings both capacities to bear on material that ranges from Bluebeard to La Llorona to Vasalisa to Skeleton Woman.

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. The book has been in continuous print since 1992 for a reason: it offers a vocabulary for things that are otherwise very difficult to name.

Leviathan

Paul Auster  ·  1992

A writer named Peter Aaron is trying to reconstruct the life of his friend Benjamin Sachs, who was found dead in a field in Wisconsin, killed by the bomb he was building. The FBI has come to Aaron because Sachs had been blowing up replicas of the Statue of Liberty across America, and they want to know why. Aaron’s account moves back through Sachs’s life — his prison sentence, his marriage, his affairs, his transformation from celebrated novelist to anonymous political actor — in an attempt to understand a man who chose to become someone else. The novel was written and published before the Oklahoma City bombing and before domestic terrorism became the subject it has since become.

Auster is at his best here — the metafictional machinery is present but subordinated to the human story, the prose is clear and propulsive, and the central question is genuinely difficult: what does it mean to commit to a political act whose logic you follow but whose cost you cannot fully accept? Sachs is not a villain and not a hero. He is a person who decided that his life, as he had been living it, was not enough — and who found that the alternative was more consuming than he had understood.

Troubling Love

Elena Ferrante  ·  1992

Delia’s mother Amalia has been found drowned near Naples, partly dressed, carrying a new bra still in its bag. Delia returns to Naples for the funeral and begins, almost despite herself, to reconstruct the days before her mother’s death. What she finds does not fit the version of her mother she has always known. Ferrante published this as her debut, under a pseudonym, and it was largely overlooked at the time. It is now read as the first iteration of themes she would develop across the Neapolitan novels: the complexity of mother–daughter relationships, the particular weight of Naples, the way women’s lives are shaped and distorted by the men who move through them.

Ferrante’s prose in translation has a quality that is very difficult to achieve — it feels immediate and interior without becoming claustrophobic. Troubling Love is a short book and it moves fast, but it is not simple. The mystery at its centre is not really about what happened to Amalia: it is about what Delia does not know about her own history and what she has chosen not to know. The ending does not resolve the ambiguity. It sits with it.