New Novels Set in the 1990s

A novel about a middle-aged court stenographer who must reexamine an ill-advised affair she had with a professor during the summer of the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

In 1993, Lili and Reid lock eyes after a Jeff Buckley show at Sin-e in New York’s East Village. Their connection is immediate and intense — kicking off a steamy summer romance that cracks something open for both of them — but the pursuit of another passion cuts it short. Thirty years later, they’re both navigating midlife as single parents of teen girls when they cross paths once more. Can they find their way to each other through the complexities of adulthood better than they could during the relative simplicity of their youth?

Against the backdrop of a boozy, restless late-90s Chicago, creative writing graduate student Mary Van Pelt and her eccentric roommate navigate the collision between party life, domestic harmony, and academic ambition.

It’s the summer of ’96 and best friends (and secret girlfriends), Hannah and Sam are driving across the country from Long Beach, New York, to the fabled queer paradise of San Francisco, free from the harsh gazes of their neighbors and the stifling demands of Hannah’s devout Orthodox Jewish mother. In San Francisco, they will finally be together as a real couple, out in the open, around other queer people. Even if the move means leaving behind Hannah’s beloved Bubbe. But when the financial strains of West Coast living push the girls to start stripping at The Chez Paree–yet another secret Hannah must keep from her family–Hannah feels trapped.

The year is 1991. Eritrea is on the verge of liberation from Ethiopian rule and in Washington, D.C.’s right-knit Eritrean community, change is in the air. Thirteen-year-old Lydia and her family are grappling with what peace after decades of war might mean for their future, just as they welcome Berekhet–a distant cousin newly arrived from Ethiopia to attend medical school. With him comes a barrage of new ideas Lydia must confront for the first time, about the stories of nationhood and family she was raised on.

It’s 1999, and Nikki Rose is the only Black editor on the staff of a prestigious fashion magazine she once thought would be her ticket to becoming a respected editor-in-chief. But after being told one too many times by her boss that “Black girls don’t sell magazines,” she walks away to take over Sugar, a struggling hip-hop music and lifestyle magazine with untapped potential. Thrown into an entirely new world of wealth, decadence, and debauchery, Nikki has just six months to save Sugar-and her own dreams. As she pulls all-nighters at the office and parties with the era’s most influential bad boys, Nikki must prove she has what it takes to lead.

Andrea and Julián haven’t seen one another in twenty-one years – not since that tragic, fateful night their senior year of high school that marked their group of friends forever. A shocking phone call brings the two together again in Houston, where they begin to unravel the truth of that year, picking open long scabbed-over wounds from their upper-class adolescence in 1990s Bolivia and the scandal that ripped them apart.

Out of money and with little to show for his art school education, John-Calum Macleod takes the ferry back home to the Isle of Harris to find that little has changed except for him. He returns to the windswept croft and the two pillars of his childhood: his father John, a sheep farmer, tweed weaver, and lay preacher in the local Presbyterian church, and his maternal grandmother Ella, a profanity-loving Glaswegian whose steady warmth helped Cal weather the sudden departure of his mother. Cal privately wonders if any lonely men might be found on the barren hillsides of home, while John is dismayed by his son’s long hair, strange clothes, and seeming unwillingness to be Saved. But Cal isn’t the only one in the croft house who is keeping secrets.

Set in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the 1990s and early 2000s, Neon Steel is acclaimed writer Jennifer Maritza McCauley’s love letter to millennial nerd culture. Anime fans, vampires, indie rappers, robots, comic book fans, and thrill seekers find their way through the Steel City’s neighborhoods and haunts.

In 1996 Chicago, twenty-five-year-old Isaac André feels like a stranger in his own life–until the world starts whispering back. The coincidences are too uncanny to ignore, but for now, they’re all happening in his favor. When Isaac buys his first computer and enters an internet chatroom, The Grassy Knoll, dedicated to conspiracy theorists, he wants to know if anyone else is experiencing a constant feeling of being watched, a nagging feeling of displacement and unease. That’s when Isaac (ElectricSheep7) meets the magnetic Noa Gayle (BirdGurl9), a mysterious stranger that shares his love for Terminator movies, Philip K. Dick, and all things sci-fi. Isaac and Noa’s soul connection feels fated, but as it deepens, so do the secrets between them.

Hana has nothing–she’s fifteen years old and living in a tiny apartment in a suburb of Tokyo with her young mother, a hostess at a local dive bar. They have no money, no security. Then Kimiko appears. Kimiko is older, a bright light in Hana’s dark world. Together they set up Lemon, a bar that, despite its shabby setting and seedy clientele, becomes a haven for Hana. Suddenly Hana has a job she loves, friends to share her days with, and the glittering promise of money. She feels like a normal girl. She feels invincible. But in the narrow alleys of Sangenjaya, nothing is as it seems.

Iranian exile Yadollah is barely scraping by in 1990s Paris. He lives in a run-down attic apartment with his friend Seyyed, and his girlfriend Ra’na. It’s an all too common situation-their apartment building houses a cast of eccentric neighbors, most of them fellow down-on-their-luck exiles from all over the world. When a mysterious new neighbor arrives on the scene, a man who ominously goes by the name of Prophet, Yadollah and his friends’ world is turned upside down.