Top ten literary works about ancestors

Daisy Hildyard was born in Yorkshire in 1984 and currently lives in London, where she is studying for a PhD on scientific language. Hunters in the Snow is her first novel.

For the Guardian, she named the ten best poems, books, and plays about our human inheritance, including:

On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin

Near the beginning, Darwin considers what we do not know about our ancestors.

"The laws governing inheritance are quite unknown; no one can say why the same peculiarity in different individuals of the same species, and in individuals of different species, is sometimes inherited and sometimes not so; [or] why the child often reverts in certain characters to its grandfather or grandmother or other much more remote ancestor."

Read about the other entries on the list.

On the Origin of Species is among Clive Finlayson's five best books on extinction and Gerald Imber's five best books on cosmetic surgery.

--Marshal Zeringue