Science fiction
The War of the Worlds
Strange cylinders fall on the English countryside, and the Martians inside have come to conquer.
Five levels, about 80 languages
- A2ElementaryShort sentences and everyday words.
- B1IntermediateYou follow clear stories about familiar things.
- B2Upper intermediateLonger sentences, richer vocabulary.
- C1AdvancedClose to the original, lightly condensed.
- C2ProficientThe complete novel.
One purchase is one book, in one language, at one level: $4.99. Another level of a book you own is $1.99. Editions nobody has asked for yet are written on request: chapter 1 in a few minutes, the rest while you read. How the levels work.
About the book
Something falls on Horsell Common
The narrator is a writer living near Woking, in Surrey, at the end of the nineteenth century. One night a falling star lands on the common near his house. In the morning a crowd gathers around a huge, hot cylinder half buried in the sand, and slowly, its top begins to unscrew. What comes out has crossed space from Mars. Within days the Martians are striding across the countryside in giant three-legged machines, with a heat-ray that burns everything in its path, and London is in flight. H. G. Wells, who lived in Woking while he wrote it, published it in 1898.
Why it works for learners
The book is a first-person eyewitness account, and its power comes from ordinary details: the milkman making his rounds as usual, crowds at a railway station, newspaper sellers shouting the news. That makes the vocabulary practical and recognizable (house, road, train, river, crowd, smoke, fire, soldier), along with the language of fear and escape. Real places anchor every scene; you could follow the route on a map of the country southwest of London. The plot is simple: survive, and understand.
Which level to start at
B1 is a good start. The story is linear, the narrator explains what he sees, and the tension survives simplification. A2 is possible if you know the story. At B2 and above, Wells’s reflections on humanity and empire come into focus, and they’re the part people still argue about. If the language gets dense, sentence-by-sentence mode lets you take one line at a time, with its audio and translation.
Read next
- The Time Machine, Wells’s first great novel
- A Princess of Mars, an American on Mars
- The Invisible Man, terror in an English village
