If you were to set aside a shelf for books on genetics, what books would you choose to put there? Bookshelf editor Jon Turney explores classic books on genetics, both old and new, to help you select your essential reading.

Design for a Life: How Behaviour Develops

Patrick Bateson and Paul Martin explain how to bake a human. 14/02/06

Invisible Frontiers: The Race to Synthesize a Human Gene

Stephen Hall's account of high stakes and high drama at the dawn of the new biotechnology. 29/01/06

Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology (1996)

Anthropologist Paul Rabinow reports from the lab. 02/09/05

In Mendel's Footnotes

Colin Tudge links modern genetics and the man who started it all. 17/01/06

Chance in the House of Fate: A Natural History of Heredity (2001)

Jennifer Ackerman's stylish guide to the unity and diversity of genes across all of life. 05/01/06

River Out of Eden (1996)

Richard Dawkins presents the history of life as a glorious flow of information. 14/12/05

In the Beginning was the Worm (2003)

Andrew Brown presents the tiny organism which proved the key to genomic technologies. 01/12/05

Life Without Genes: The History and Future of Genomes (2000)

Adrian Woolfson's dreams of biologies past and present. 15/11/05

Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and his Quest for the Origins of Behaviour (1999)

Jonathan Weiner profiles Seymour Benzer, one of the Lords of the Fly. 01/11/05

The Common Thread: A Story of Science, Politics, Ethics and the Human Genome (2003)

Mild-mannered Englishman John Sulston devotes life to worm, wins Nobel Prize. 01/10/05

The Double Helix (1968)

James Watson remembers what it was really like in 1953, or does he? 06/07/05

The Language of the Genes (1994)

Finely honed tales of inheritance and DNA from geneticist Steve Jones. 05/03/05

Nature via Nurture (2003)

Matt Ridley reconciles nature and nurture. 01/02/05

Signs of Life (1994)

Robert Pollack calls for literary criticism of DNA texts. 09/09/04

The DNA Mystique (1996)

Dorothy Nelkin and Susan Lindee on the genome as the soul of the cell. 10/07/04

Lifelines (1998)

Steven Rose puts the organism back into biology 04/04/04

The Lives to Come (1997)

Philosopher Philip Kitcher explains how to think about eugenics. 03/04/04

The Eighth Day of Creation (1979)

Horace Judson's chronicle of the creators of molecular biology. 12/02/04

The Logic of Life: A history of heredity (1974)

Francois Jacob on the evolution of ideas about heredity. 10/12/03

The Selfish Gene (1976)

Richard Dawkins' classic account of what every gene really wants. 10/10/03