The unlikely tomes that prove it’s always the quiet ones you have to look out for.

“There’s more to life than books, you know, but not much more,” Mr Steven Patrick Morrissey once opined, riffing on the central importance of literature to life. This will not be news to the bibliophile who understands that to pick up a book is to hope for escape and enlightenment. But this intensely personal experience can also have collective impact. Throughout the ages, books have proved the foundation of world religions, fuelled human rights movements and sparked revolution, for good and for bad.

In 100 Books That Changed The World, authors Messrs Scott Christianson and Colin Salter list the biggest hitters, from Rights Of Man to The Second Sex, and 1984 to Ulysses. Amid these essential entries are some unexpected additions of books that might not immediately spring to mind as game changers. But changed hearts and minds they most certainly have. Here are five unexpected revolutions in handy paperback form, should you crave something different.

By Mr Robert Hooke

An illustrated guide to parasites and insects that included an 18in drawing of a flea may not, on the face of it, appear to be a particularly riveting or game-changing read. But in 1665, English polymath Mr Robert Hooke struck bookselling gold with the publication of Micrographia, his breakthrough volume on the previously unseen miniscule world. The Oxford graduate used a new-fangled microscope to inspect creatures and forms too small for the naked eye to see, then drafted in exacting detail what he witnessed. The results came to be regarded as one of the most important in the history of science, inspiring wider public interest in all things boffin.

By Mr Mark Twain

Most likely you’ll have first encountered The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn, Mr Mark Twain’s boisterous tale of two rebellious teens and their slave friend rollicking along the Mississippi River, in the children’s section of the local library. But Mr Samuel Langhorne Clemens, writing under pseudonym, was not simply playing around; instead the popular humorist harnessed the story of Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn and Jim to shine a light on Southern antebellum race relations and adult hypocrisy. But don’t take it from us that this is an important book – as Mr Ernest Hemingway said: “All American writing comes from that... There has been nothing as good since.”

By Mr Aldous Huxley

The 1960s might not have happened without Mr Aldous Huxley. Or, at least, it wouldn’t have been as fun. The author of a novel about a nation on drugs (1932’s Brave New World), Mr Huxley took things one step further with The Doors Of Perception, a clear-eyed (sort of) record of his first mescaline trip. Mr Huxley experienced a change in perception during the eight-hour adventure, turning evangelical about the power of hallucinogens. Once out of his haze, he introduced Mr Allen Ginsberg to psychedelics, putting drugs on the must-do list for Beat poets, the Beatles and anyone who claims they were at Woodstock.

By Ms Rachel Carson

In the US of the middle of the 20th century, Ms Rachel Carson was not expected to change the world. An unmarried, middle-class nature writer and marine biologist, her CV highlights included time spent as editor for the US Fish and Wildlife Service. But as a freelance writer, she flourished, alighting on the problematic side effects of pesticide use and unearthing evidence of cancer-causing chemicals. Despite a cancer diagnosis herself, she persisted with work on Silent Spring, her book about the environmental damage from chemicals. Hailed by scientists and conservationists, it sold more than two million copies and stands as a landmark book on environmental catastrophe. Ms Carson’s methodology and message, meanwhile, remain as urgent as ever.

By Mr Thomas Piketty

It’s five years since Mr Thomas Piketty’s bombshell book on why capitalism is catastrophic for equality was published. A New York Times bestseller, its wider impact is not so easily totted up. Governments have not rushed to change a system where, as Mr Piketty argues, wealth always trumps labour and inequality widens. Politicians have been less than enthusiastic about his solutions, too; there’s been no campaign promises to enact his proposed 80 per cent tax on wealth. But Capital was a conversation changer, its effects felt from the publication of Paradise Papers to Mr Bernie Sanders’ stump speeches. It put wealth inequality firmly in the spotlight, from which – uncomfortably for some – it refuses to budge.

100 Books That Changed The World by Messrs Scott Christianson and Colin Salter is out 6 March in the US (Universe Publishing NY) and 5 April in the UK (Batsford)