A level 2 Factfiles Oxford Bookworms Library graded reader. This version includes an audio book: listen to the story as you read. Written for Learners of English by Barnaby Newbolt. What are the most beautiful, the most interesting, the most wonderful things in the world? The Great Pyramid, the Great Wall of China, the Panama Canal – everyone has their favourites. And there are natural wonders too – Mount Everest, Niagara Falls, and the Northern Lights, for example. Here is one person’s choice of eleven wonders. Some of them are made by people, and others are natural. Everyone knows the Grand Canyon and the Great Barrier Reef – but what about the Iguazú Falls, or the old city of Petra? Come and discover new wonders . . .

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas: A World Tour Underwater is a classic science fiction adventure novel by French writer Jules Verne. The novel was originally serialized from March 1869 through June 1870 in Pierre-Jules Hetzel's fortnightly periodical, the Magasin d'éducation et de récréation

Surveys the online social habits of American teens and analyzes the role technology and social media plays in their lives, examining common misconceptions about such topics as identity, privacy, danger, and bullying.

A vibrant novel from Booker Prize winner Penelope Lively—a wry, wise story about the surprising ways lives intersect When Charlotte Rainsford, a retired schoolteacher, is accosted by a petty thief on a London street, the consequences ripple across the lives of acquaintances and strangers alike. A marriage unravels after an illicit love affair is revealed through an errant cell phone message; a posh yet financially strapped interior designer meets a business partner who might prove too good to be true; an old-guard historian tries to recapture his youthful vigor with an ill-conceived idea for a TV miniseries; and a middle-aged central European immigrant learns to speak English and reinvents his life with the assistance of some new friends. In this engaging, utterly absorbing and brilliantly told novel, Penelope Lively shows us how one random event can cause marriages to fracture and heal themselves, opportunities to appear and disappear, lovers who might never have met to find each other and entire lives to become irrevocably changed. Funny, humane, touching, sly and sympathetic, How It All Began is a brilliant sleight of hand from an author at the top of her game.

Set in New England, a farmer struggles to survive a bare existence, tethered to his farm, first by his helpless parents and then by a hypochondriac wife. Yet, when his wife's alluring cousin comes to stay, his dreams are rekindled

In this exuberant celebration of the world's museums, great and small, revered writers like Ann Patchett, Julian Barnes, Ali Smith, and more tell us about their favorite museums, including the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York, the Mus'e Rodin in Paris, and the Prado in Madrid. These essays, collected from the pages of The Economist's Intelligent Life magazine, reveal the special hold that some museums have over us all. Acclaimed novelist William Boyd visits the Leopold Museum in Vienna -- a shrine to his favorite artist, Egon Schiele, whom Boyd first discovered on a postcard as a University student. In front of her favorite Rodins, Allison Pearson recalls a traumatic episode she suffered at the hands of a schoolteacher following a trip to the Mus'e in Paris. Neil Gaiman admires the fantastic world depicted in British outsider artist Richard Dadd's "The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke," a tiny painting that also decorated the foldout cover of a Queen album, housed in the Victorian room of Tate Britain's Pre-Raphaelite collection. Ann Patchett fondly revisits Harvard University's Museum of Natural History -- which she discovered at 19, while in the throes of summer romance with a biology student named Jack. Treasure Palaces is a treasure trove of wonders, a tribute to the diversity and power of the museums, the safe-keepers of our world's most extraordinary artifacts, and an intimate look into the deeply personal reveries we fall into when before great art.