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The War of the Worlds

Herbert George Wells

The War of the Worlds

Paper book: €26.99

Digital: €10.99

Original publication
1898
Bilingual edition
12 June 2026
Pages
479
Difficulty
Medium
Genres
Science Fiction
Moods
Imagine tomorrow, Get the chills
Translated from
English

Book summary

At the end of the nineteenth century, a strange cylinder from space crashes near London. Martians emerge from it, armed with giant machines and a burning ray, and the narrator has to flee across an English countryside plunged into chaos.

It is one of the very first stories of alien invasion. Faced with the Martians, a civilisation that thought itself invincible discovers how fragile it is.

The narrator tells the events day by day, like an eyewitness account, and the novel is easy to read in the language you are learning.

The plot

A cylinder from the sky opens from within. One morning, near London, an astronomer finds a huge metal cylinder half buried in the sand. Then the lid begins to turn, very slowly: someone inside is unscrewing it.

The world of the book

Around 1895, people wonder if Mars is inhabited. In 1894, the American astronomer Percival Lowell draws Mars covered in long straight lines. To him, they are canals dug by intelligent beings, and his books captivate…

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