Collider's 6 Best Books Since 1990: The List

Collider has ranked the six best books released since 1990. The publication's list features novels that it says each 'changes the temperature of your thinking while you read it.' Here are the selections and what Collider highlights about each.

The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin

Collider praises the novel's structure, which follows a woman named Essun who controls seismic forces. After her husband murders their son, Essun sets out to find her kidnapped daughter as the world literally splits open due to a catastrophic geological rupture. The publication notes that the story shifts between different lives and ages, forcing readers to piece together emotional logic. When the connections form, earlier chapters gain new weight. Collider emphasizes that the apocalypse never becomes mere backdrop; Essun's focus remains on her missing child, creating a devastating scale mismatch between a dying planet and a mother's mission.

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

This novel, per Collider, unfolds as Kathy H.'s memories of growing up at the idyllic English school Hailsham with her friends Ruth and Tommy. They gradually learn they were created as clones to have their organs harvested. Collider says Ishiguro's restraint makes the horror hit moments after the cause. Kathy recalls ordinary adolescent experiences like cassettes and crushes with the same care as any childhood, because the extraordinary cruelty has been normalized to the point where no guards are needed. Even the hope that love might delay their fate becomes heartbreakingly small, according to Collider.

Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald

Collider describes this novel as following architectural historian Jacques Austerlitz, who slowly uncovers that he was sent from Czechoslovakia to Britain on a Kindertransport as a child. Most of his early life, including his parents' fate, lies buried under decades of forgetting. The book moves through conversations, photographs, train stations, and memories, with no interest in conventional plot. Collider writes that a forgotten detail can open the door to forty years of suppressed history. A railway station becomes unbearable once Austerlitz understands what happened there. Sebald makes memory physical, stored in architecture and objects, leaving ordinary places haunted.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

According to Collider, this novel follows a father and his young son traveling south through a burned, post-apocalyptic America. They push a shopping cart, searching for food and shelter. McCarthy's stripped-down prose makes each loaf of bread or warm fire feel enormous. The horror, Collider notes, comes not from the ruined world but from what people can become inside it. The father teaches the boy about 'carrying the fire,' a morality aimed at keeping the child's belief in goodness alive. Collider mentions that John Hillcoat's 2009 film adaptation captured the ash and misery well, but the book leaves a deeper impression of a child learning compassion from a father too terrified to practice it.

The Known World by Edward P. Jones

Collider highlights this novel's setting in antebellum Virginia, beginning with the death of Henry Townsend, a formerly enslaved Black man who became a slaveholder himself. The publication notes that Jones refuses a morally tidy view of slavery. The book keeps widening, with minor characters suddenly receiving entire futures. Slavery stops being a backdrop and becomes a network affecting law, family, money, religion, memory, and identity. Collider observes that Henry's ownership of other human beings is shocking because Jones never treats it as a twist; it is simply one fact in a world that can teach people to reproduce the logic that once imprisoned them.

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

Collider ranks this as one of the best books since 1990. The novel follows Thomas Cromwell from his origins as a blacksmith's son to the inner circle of Henry VIII, helping the king break from his marriage to Catherine of Aragon and navigate the Tudor turmoil. According to Collider, Mantel makes Tudor politics feel newly alive and dangerous. Cromwell notices debts, favors, moods, and weaknesses, and power becomes about remembering who owes whom. The BBC adaptation with Mark Rylance is excellent, but Collider says the novel has something TV cannot replicate: the speed and privacy of Cromwell's thought. The publication concludes that readers finish Wolf Hall understanding why people feared, relied on, and kept inviting him back into the room.

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