1895 Best Seller.

One of the most influential anti-war stories ever written The Red Badge of Courage was adapted as a film in 1951 by John Huston. Crane wanted to show what war was like and achieved a ground breaking 'psychological portrayal of fear'. The story follows an archetypical 19 year old recruit in the American Civil War.

Nominated for a Hugo for Best Novel in 2007

"Blindsight is a tour de force, redefining the First Contact story for good. Peter Watts' aliens are neither humans in funny make-up nor incomprehensible monoliths beyond human comprehension - they're something new and infinitely more disturbing, forcing us to confront unpalatable possibilities about the nature of consciousness. It'll make your skin crawl when you stop to think about it. Strongly recommended: this may be the best hard SF read of 2006."

- Charles Stross

Nietzsche soars in philosophic thought in Beyond Good and Evil. He transcended most of his 19th century contemporaries and considered the bulk of their philosophic thinking to be greatly limited by their acceptance of Christian premises. Denying a universal morality for all people, Nietzsche instead proposed that the individual's "will to power" upon the world was the means to move beyond good and evil. Agree? Disagree? Agree to disagree? Brilliantly thought provoking.

Written as a dialogue between Socrates and Phaedrus, the subject within Phaedrus (370B.C.) appears to be that of love - love in its proper form as well as love erotic. Widely considered to be one of Plato's greatest works. Profoundly Plato.

A seminal work of Realism, and one of the most influential novels ever written.

"What is remarkable in Madame Bovary is that its mediocre beings, with their earthbound ambitions and pedestrian problems, impress us, by virtue of the structure and the writing that create them, as beings who are out of the ordinary within their ordinary manner of being." - Mario Vargas Llosa, in The Perpetual Orgy

The novel focuses on a doctor's wife, Emma Bovary, as she spirals out of control trying to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life.

Many scholars today consider the Treatise to be Hume's most important work and one of the most important books in the history of philosophy.

In The ethics Aristotle examines the nature of virtue and the purpose of life. He believed virtue could be understood only through action - one had to be virtuous to know virtue. The work surveys all the areas of human concern; courage, generosity, honour, justice, friendship, wit, etc. Aristotle's ideas dominated western thinking until the renaissance. The Ethics is considered to be one of Aristotle's most accessible works.