There are certain books that change the conversation and the way we see the world. The editors of ELLE dug deep and picked the 30 from the last 30 years that every self-respecting reader should have on her shelf. "I've read every single book on the list," says Michael Cunningham. "All I can say is, it's a true honor to be among them."

1986: THE HANDMAID'S TALE, MARGARET ATWOOD

(HOUGHTON MIFFLIN)

Emma Donoghue thinks about this book "every time I get cash out of an ATM; I remember the moment when the women find their bank accounts have been closed. Not so much a novel as a horrifying prophecy, and every girl should read it."

1987: BELOVED, TONI MORRISON (KNOPF)

"Now more than ever," says Alice Hoffman, "it's important for us to hear the message of this incredible novel: If we deny the past, we are doomed to be haunted by it."

1988: LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA, GABRIEL GARCíA MáRQUEZ (KNOPF)

Laura Hillenbrand says, "I was gravely ill, bedbound in a dark room" when she first encountered this novel. It proved "utterly transporting, lifting me from my stillness and drenching me in a magical world. Long after I read it, the sensations still resonated in me."

1989: THE JOY LUCK CLUB, AMY TAN (PUTNAM)

Translated into 35 languages, this was a revelation of mother-daughter relationships.

1990: POSSESSION, A. S. BYATT (RANDOM HOUSE)

Won the Booker Prize. No novelist, wrote the Paris Review, "has written so well of both Darwinian theory and the ancient, inexhaustible subject of sexual passion."

1991: AMERICAN PSYCHO, BRET EASTON ELLIS (VINTAGE)

"I'm going to admit I skipped some bits," says Candace Bushnell. "I skipped the killing parts. I couldn't read them. I think the great books do make people uncomfortable."

1992: BASTARD OUT OF CAROLINA, DOROTHY ALLISON (DUTTON)

To Donoghue's mind, "There's no one like [Allison] for eloquently, howlingly protesting about downtrodden lives."

1992: THE SECRET HISTORY, DONNA TARTT (KNOPF)

This liberal-arts-school murder mystery makes Donoghue "more tense—in a deeply pleasurable way—than any other I've read." Porochista Khakpour remembers "reading it feverishly on the subway and then still reading it as I walked home, like a cartoon bumping into lampposts."

1993: THE SHIPPING NEWS, E. ANNIE PROULX (SCRIBNER)

Won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction by following her own advice: "What I find to be very bad advice is the snappy little sentence 'Write what you know,' " Proulx has said. "It is the most tiresome and stupid advice that could possibly be given. If we write simply about what we know, we never grow. We don't develop any facility for languages, or an interest in others, or a desire to travel and explore and face experience head on. We just coil tighter and tighter into our boring little selves. What one should write about is what interests one."

1994: PROZAC NATION, ELIZABETH WURTZEL (HOUGHTON MIFFLIN)

A divisive book, it was exploring solipsism and SSRIs waaaay before the birth of the confessional blog generation—and probably inspired them, even if they don't know it.

1996: ANGELA'S ASHES, FRANK McCOURT (SCRIBNER)

With "a powerful appreciation of stellar nonfiction," Anna Quindlen loves Angela's Ashes for reflecting "the human condition as vividly and beautifully as any novel."

1996: INTO THE WILD, JON KRAKAUER (VILLARD)

When Maile Meloy read the book, she "had been working as a river ranger in a remote canyon in Utah, and [the book's protagonist] McCandless—a little older than I was—seemed very familiar and recognizable. There were dangerous paths to go down, in that direction. Krakauer's devastating book is about someone who wanted to, and did, live in the wilderness, at the limits of his own self-reliance, and didn't want to die there."

1996: SEX AND THE CITY, CANDACE BUSHNELL (ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS)

The mother of chick lit and the book that inspired a generation of women to own their power.

1997: THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS, ARUNDHATI ROY (RANDOM HOUSE)

Won the Booker Prize. It was Roy's debut novel, an epic about India—but in surprising ways.

1998: THE HOURS, MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM (FSG)

"I avoided this for years because it sounded so derivative, a book about the writing of a book," says Donoghue. "How wrong I was! Cunningham uses Mrs. Dalloway like a stone dropped in a lake, finding fresh and real drama in how a book touches lives. After that, I had to track down everything else he's written."

1999: INTERPRETER OF MALADIES, JHUMPA LAHIRI (MARINER)

"As guest editor of the 1999 edition of Best American Short Stories," says Amy Tan, "I had to do a blind reading of 120 stories, the gems that had been gleaned from over 2,000 stories published in 1999. From that shining pile, I had to pick just 20. When I finished 'Interpreter of Maladies' [the title story of this collection], I knew I had one of my 20."

2000: THE TIPPING POINT, MALCOLM GLADWELL (LITTLE, BROWN)

While he didn't coin the term, Gladwell blasted it into common usage with his viral book…on the nature of virality.

2000: WHITE TEETH, ZADIE SMITH (RANDOM HOUSE)

Says Donoghue, "She's a Dickens for our time: the one writer I know who can bring a whole city to life through the clamorous chorus of its citizens' voices."

2001: DON'T LET'S GO TO THE DOGS TONIGHT, ALEXANDRA FULLER (RANDOM HOUSE)

"I had written eight or nine novels that had been spectacular failures," Fuller has said. "Finally, when my first agent actually told me that she really didn't think she could read another word of my writing…and dropped me, I decided to write the truth." What did she read after she did so? "The Hours…I have read it twice in two months and still find my jaw at my knees."

2002: ATONEMENT, IAN MCEWAN (NAN A. TALESE)

Won the National Book Critics Circle Award. A meta-tragedy, mystery, and epic, all at once.

2002: EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED, JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER (HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT)

Won the 2004 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. An autobiographical novel, it addressed the Holocaust in a brilliantly postmodern way.

2003: THE KITE RUNNER, KHALED HOSSEINI (RIVERHEAD)

On the New York Times best-seller list for 103 weeks, this novel taught us nuances about Afghanistan in an unnuanced time.

2004: GILEAD, MARILYNNE ROBINSON (FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX)

"Walking out onto my city block after reading this book, even the fire hydrants looked radiant," says Nell Freudenberger.

2005: THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING, JOAN DIDION (KNOPF)

"I had been looking for a way to understand grief and had been reading Didion since high school," says Meloy. "She turned her exacting eye on her own mind and physiology in the aftermath of a private catastrophe, and the result is both guidebook and art."

2006: EAT, PRAY, LOVE, ELIZABETH GILBERT (VIKING)

"I think we've all had that experience…we feel like running away from our own lives," says Bushnell, who loved the book's fantasy fulfillment. "You go to the airport and you look around and you're like, 'Which flight should I get on?' "

2010: UNBROKEN, LAURA HILLENBRAND (RANDOM HOUSE)

"In an age of phonied-up memoirs and so-called true stories that we discover have been massaged into some pleasing but not necessarily accurate shape," Quindlen says, this epic book uses "meticulous detail work to do that most difficult of things: tell the truth."

2012: GONE GIRL, GILLIAN FLYNN (CROWN)

The high-speed, genre-busting breakthrough novel sold more than 2 million copies in a single year.

2013: AMERICANAH, CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE (KNOPF)

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle award, this is an identity story for our time.

2013: THE GOLDFINCH, DONNA TARTT (LITTLE, BROWN)

Won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Tartt has said of the way she writes: "The odd thing about it is that it's so long between books for me that the publishing world changes completely every time I'm out, so it's like I've never done it before."

2013: LEAN IN, SHERYL SANDBERG (KNOPF)

"Sandberg is embarking on the most ambitious mission to reboot feminism and reframe discussions of gender since the launch of Ms. magazine."—Time magazine

This article originally appeared in the September 2015 issue of ELLE.

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