Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (Penguin, £7.99 in UK)

Rachel Carson died as long ago as 1964 but the wide ripples created by this book, when first published a few years before that, have continued to spread, and today she ranks as a pioneer of the environmental and ecological consciousness which has become a global affair in our day. Silent Spring was one of the very first books to bring home what the human race was doing to this small planet, and whither this reality was likely to lead us. Rachel Carson was no pious amateur in the field, she was in fact an experienced marine biologist, before her vocation as a born writer took over.