Herbert George Wells: which book should you start with?

An English inventor explains to his friends that time is a dimension like any other, then sets off in a machine he has built himself. On his return, exhausted, he describes a very distant future in which the Eloi, a frail and carefree people, live among gardens, while other creatures hide underground. It was with this book that time travel became a great subject for fiction. H. G. Wells imagines what would become of humanity if the gap between rich and poor kept widening for thousands of years. Told like a story among friends, this short novel is easy to read in the language you are learning.

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.

Saved from a shipwreck, Edward Prendick is put ashore on a remote island in the Pacific, home to a banished scientist, Dr Moreau, and his assistant. At night, screams come from the laboratory. The island's strange inhabitants recite a Law like a prayer: “Not to go on all-fours; that is the Law.” H. G. Wells asks a question that is still with us: how far does science have the right to go, and what separates man from animal? Full of suspense, this novel is easy to read in the language you are learning.

In a quiet London suburb, twenty-one-year-old Ann Veronica Stanley is stifled by the authority of her father, who forbids her to go to a fancy-dress ball. She leaves home to live alone in London, study biology and run her own life. But money soon runs short, and a young woman's freedom has a price in those days. Wells caused a scandal with the story of this “New Woman”, who dares to claim the right to love and to choose, in the age of the suffragettes. Its lively, determined heroine makes it a gripping read in the language you are learning.