Patricia Cornwell

Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
The first American novel to become an international best-seller, Stowe's novel charts the progress from slavery to freedom of fugitives who escape the chains of American chattel slavery, and of a martyr who transcends all earthly ties. At the middle of the nineteenth-century, the names of its characters - Little Eva, Topsy, Uncle Tom - were renowned. A hundred years later, 'Uncle Tom' still had meaning, but, to Blacks everywhere it had become a curse.

William Golding: Lord of the Flies
Golding's best-known novel is the story of a group of boys who, after a plane crash, set up a fragile community on a previously uninhabited island. As memories of home recede and the blood from frenzied pig-hunts arouses them, the boys' childish fear turns into something deeper and more primitive.

Seamus Heaney: Field Work
Field Work, which first appeared in 1979, is a superb collection of lyrics and narrative poems from one of the literary masters of our time. At the centre of this collection, which includes groups of elegies and love poems, there is a short sonnet sequence that concentrates themes apparent elsewhere in the book: individual responsibility for choices; the artist's commitment to his vocation; the vulnerability of all in the face of death.