Edwin A. Abbott's classic Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884) is a short, mathematical, fantasy novel featuring a flat, two-dimensional world inhabited by geometric shapes. When one resident, A. Square (which is also the pseudonym under which Abbott originally published the novel), discovers the third dimension, he is forced to change his assumptions about reality.

Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, originally published in 1899, details the journey of the narrator, Marlow, into the Belgian Congo. Marlow is sent to find a company agent who has gone mad and who has fallen out of touch with his European company while at the Inner Station. In the process, Marlow witnesses the horrors of European colonialism. The book inspired the famous 1979 movie Apocalypse Now, which set Conrad's story in Vietnam.

Critics have noted that Høeg is one of the most popular and...