A level 1 Oxford Bookworms Library graded reader. This version includes an audio book: listen to the story as you read. Retold for Learners of English by Clare West. How do you get a licence if you want to keep a monkey? What can you do if your wife has a lover? How can you see into the future? Where can you go for an exciting but cheap holiday somewhere hot and far away? How can you persuade your girlfriend or boyfriend to marry you? The characters in these six original short plays are looking for answers to these questions. While trying to solve their problems, people get into some very funny situations. Each play gives an amusing view of life today, and there is often an unexpected ending.

A level 1 Oxford Bookworms Library graded reader. This version includes an audio book: listen to the story as you read. Written for Learners of English by Michael Dean. Do you believe in ghosts? Jerry doesn't. He's a nineteen-year-old American, who just wants a good holiday with his friend, Brad. They are travelling round the north of England by bicycle. But strange things begin to happen in the small hotel where they are staying. First, Brad seems to think that he has been there before. And then a girl called Ellen appears . . . The first of these three original plays is set in the seventeenth century, and the other two take place in modern times. In each play, a ghost comes back from the dead to change the lives of living people.

Word count 5,925

A level 1 Oxford Bookworms Library graded reader. Retold for Learners of English by John Escott. Sherlock Holmes is the greatest detective the world has ever seen, and he knows it. As the famous bank-robber, John Clay, says to him, 'You think of everything, Mr Holmes. You're very clever.' People come to him with problems that no one, not even the police, can solve. Holmes sits, and thinks, and smokes his pipe, and in the end he finds the answer. In these plays, based on two of his stories, Holmes, helped by his old friend, Dr Watson, uses his great intelligence to solve two unusual and interesting cases.

Reading level: 1 [green].

Paul Pennyfeather is a second-year theology student who, as a result of mistaken identity, has his “education discontinued for personal reasons.” He ends up as a schoolmaster at a fourth-rate school, hired despite not meeting any of the qualifications in their advertisement. He there encounters a cornucopia of eccentric characters, including another master who has a wooden leg, a former clergyman with capital-D Doubts, and a servant who tells everyone he’s rich, but with a different tale for each about why he’s posing as a servant. Paul’s time at school leads to romance with a student’s mother, and that in turn leads to enormous complications in Paul’s life. Inspired in part by his own experiences in school and as a schoolmaster, Evelyn Waugh’s first published novel, Decline and Fall, is a dark and occasionally farcical satire of British college life. It’s something of a perverse coming-of-age story, subverting the expected journey and ending that the archetype usually demands. Shining a devastating light on many of the societal struggles of post-WWI Britain, Waugh took his novel’s title from another work that revealed the ineluctable descent of a great society: Gibbons’ The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Waugh issued a new edition of Decline and Fall in 1960 that contained restored text that was removed by his publisher from the first edition. This Standard Ebooks edition follows the first edition. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.