English · Intermediate
Read The War of the Worlds in Englishwith every sentence explained
H. G. Wells · 1898
Free to start · iPhone, iPad & Mac
About the book
The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells was first published in 1898. In Passage you read the full text in the original English, marked intermediate and filed under science fiction and thriller and suspense. It runs to about 59,700 words.
They came from Mars. And nothing on Earth could stop them.
One summer night, a blazing object falls from the sky onto Horsell Common, near the quiet town of Woking in Surrey. Crowds gather to stare at the strange metal cylinder half-buried in the sand. Then its lid begins to unscrew — and what crawls out is not human.
Within days, giant three-legged fighting machines are striding across the English countryside, burning everything in their path with an invisible Heat-Ray and choking whole towns with poisonous black smoke. Our narrator, separated from his wife, must flee across a land in panic as the invaders march towards London.
H. G. Wells's 1898 masterpiece invented the alien invasion story. Its famous 1938 radio version by Orson Welles convinced some listeners that the attack was real.
- Author
- H. G. Wells
- First published
- 1898
- Language
- English
- Level
- Intermediate
- Genre
- Science Fiction, Thriller and Suspense
- Length
- About 59,700 words
How it opens
No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same.
Reading The War of the Worlds in Passage
Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in English. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:
- a natural translation of that exact sentence,
- a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
- the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
- all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.
It's marked intermediate: comfortable once everyday English feels familiar, with the harder sentences one tap away. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.
