Suitable for younger learners Word count 9,295

A level 3 Oxford Bookworms Library graded reader. This version includes an audio book: listen to the story as you read. Retold for Learners of English by John Escott. 'We have to leave our house in London,' Mother said to the children. 'We're going to live in the country, in a little house near a railway line.' And so begins a new life for Roberta, Peter, and Phyllis. They become the railway children - they know all the trains, Perks the station porter is their best friend, and they have many adventures on the railway line. But why has their father had to go away? Where is he, and will he ever come back?

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is an 1865 English children's novel by Lewis Carroll, a mathematics don at the University of Oxford. It details the story of a girl named Alice who falls through a rabbit hole into a fantasy world of anthropomorphic creatures. It is seen as an example of the literary nonsense genre. The artist John Tenniel provided 42 wood-engraved illustrations for the book.It received positive reviews upon release and is now one of the best-known works of Victorian literature; its narrative, structure, characters and imagery have had a widespread influence on popular culture and literature, especially in the fantasy genre. It is credited as helping end an era of didacticism in children's literature, inaugurating an era in which writing for children aimed to "delight or entertain". The tale plays with logic, giving the story lasting popularity with adults as well as with children. The titular character Alice shares her name with Alice Liddell, a girl Carroll knewscholars disagree about the extent to which the character was based upon her.

Suitable for younger learners Word count 6,508

A stranger with a striking appearance arrives in the small village of Bramblehurst on a cold, snowy day. His face is completely covered in bandages, with only a fake nose protruding. The villagers wonder why he is disguised, and when mysterious burglaries begin to occur, they decide to unmask the stranger. What they discover is not just a man trapped by his own creation, but a chilling reflection of the unsolvable secrets deep within human nature. The Invisible Man is a timeless classic that not only entertains and thrills, but also sheds light on questions of human nature and the dangers that arise when the boundaries of science are crossed. It is a captivating and thought-provoking reading experience that has challenged readers for generations to contemplate their own life choices. H. G. WELLS [1866-1946] was a British author and pioneer in the science fiction genre. His works, including The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds, delved into futuristic and societal critique themes. Wells’s visionary portrayals of technology, social structures, and extraterrestrial life made him one of the most influential writers in his field and a precursor to modern science fiction.

"It's a funny old house. They have this ceremony every summer . . . There's an old chapel, in the grounds of the house. It's half-derelict. The Hunters keep bees in there. Every year, on the same day, the family processes to the chapel. They open the combs, taste the honey. Take it back to the house. Half for them -" my father winced, as though he had bitten down on a sore tooth. "And half for us." Catherine, a successful barrister, vanishes from a train station on the eve of her anniversary. Is it because she saw a figure - someone she believed long dead? Or was it a shadow cast by her troubled, fractured mind? The answer lies buried in the past. It lies in the events of the hot, seismic summer of 1989, at Vanes - a mysterious West Country manor house - where a young girl, Jane Lestrange, arrives to stay with the gilded, grand Hunter family, and where a devastating tragedy will unfold. Over the summer, as an ancient family ritual looms closer, Janey falls for each member of the family in turn. She and Kitty, the eldest daughter of the house, will forge a bond that decades later, is still shaping the present . . . 'We need the bees to survive, and they need us to survive. Once you understand that, you understand the history of Vanes, you understand our family.'