Oxford University Press

The Oxford Bookworms Library provides superb reading and student / teacher support for the classroom, and is also highly recommended for schools running Extensive Reading Programmes, offering the right range of books that encourage students to read for pleasure. When a large plane is hijacked, the Prime Minister looks at the list of passengers and suddenly becomes very, very frightened. There is a name on the list that the Prime Minister knows very well — too well. There is someone on that plane who will soon be dead — if the hijackers can find out who he is! And there isn't much time. One man lies dead on the runway. In a few minutes the hijackers will use their guns again. And the Prime Minister knows who they are going to kill.

The Oxford Bookworms Library provides superb reading and student / teacher support for the classroom, and is also highly recommended for schools running Extensive Reading Programmes, offering the right range of books that encourage students to read for pleasure. In our world today a hummingbird is a small, brilliantly coloured bird that lives in the tall trees of tropical forests. In the far distant future, Hummingbird (Hummy for short) is a girl of sixteen who lives somewhere in the Galaxy, on a planet called Just Like Home. She has the name 'Hummingbird' in big letters on all her clothes, but she has never seen a real hummingbird. She has never seen any living animal or bird at all. The Book of Remembering says that there were once many animals on a planet called Earth, but that was before the Burning, a long, long time ago...

The Oxford Bookworms Library provides superb reading and student / teacher support for the classroom, and is also highly recommended for schools running Extensive Reading Programmes, offering the right range of books that encourage students to read for pleasure. Sam Sylvester is a teacher who wants his class to have ambition, and to do great things in life. So he enters them for a sporting competition against the rich students of Greycoats School. The team that he has chosen for the competition think Sam has gone crazy. 'Who, Sir? Me, Sir?' says little Hoomey, his eyes round with horror. 'We'll never beat Greycoats', the others cry. 'Never in a million years!' But you don't know what you can do — until you try...

The Oxford Bookworms Library provides superb reading and student / teacher support for the classroom, and is also highly recommended for schools running Extensive Reading Programmes, offering the right range of books that encourage students to read for pleasure. People who ride racehorses love the speed, the excitement, the danger — and winning the race. Philip Nore has been riding for many years and he always wants to win — but sometimes he is told to lose. Why? And what is the mystery about the photographer, George Millace, who has just died in a car crash? Philip Nore knows the answer to the first question, and he wants to find out the answer to the second. But as he begins to learn George Millace's secrets, he realizes that his own life is in danger.

The Oxford Bookworms Library provides superb reading and student / teacher support for the classroom, and is also highly recommended for schools running Extensive Reading Programmes, offering the right range of books that encourage students to read for pleasure. Scarlet is the colour of sin, and the letter 'A' stands for 'Adultery'. In the 1600s, in Boston, Massachusetts, love was allowed only between a husband and a wife. A child born outside marriage was a child of sin. Hester Prynne must wear the scarlet letter on her dress for the rest of her life. How can she ever escape from this public shame? What will happen to her child, growing up in the shadow of the scarlet letter? The future holds no joy for Hester Prynne. And what will happen to her sinful lover — the father of her child?

The Oxford Bookworms Library provides superb reading and student / teacher support for the classroom, and is also highly recommended for schools running Extensive Reading Programmes, offering the right range of books that encourage students to read for pleasure. If you find a locked room in a lonely inn, don't try to open it, even on a bright sunny day. If you find a strange whistle hidden among the stones of an old church, don't blow it. If a mysterious man gives you a piece of paper with strange writing on it, give it back to him at once. And if you call a dead man from his grave, don't expect to sleep peacefully ever again. Read these five ghost stories by daylight, and make sure your door is locked.

The Oxford Bookworms Library provides superb reading and student / teacher support for the classroom, and is also highly recommended for schools running Extensive Reading Programmes, offering the right range of books that encourage students to read for pleasure. 'I don't know that you have done anything wrong', Miss Hepplewhite said. 'But it is possible that you have done something rather dangerous'. William and Susie thought they were just playing a game when they cooked a witch's brew in the old barn and said a spell over it, but Martha was not so sure. And indeed, the three friends soon learn that they have called up something dark and evil out of the distant past...

The Oxford Bookworms Library provides superb reading and student / teacher support for the classroom, and is also highly recommended for schools running Extensive Reading Programmes, offering the right range of books that encourage students to read for pleasure. Chief Inspector Morse is drinking a pint of beer. He is thinking about an attractive woman who lives not far away. The woman he is thinking of is hanging, dead, from the ceiling of her kitchen. On the floor lies a chair, almost two metres away from the woman's feet. Chief Inspector Morse finishes his pint, and orders another. Perhaps he will visit Anne, after all. But he is in no particular hurry. Meanwhile, Anne is still hanging in her kitchen, waiting for the police to come and cut her down. She is in no hurry, either.

The Oxford Bookworms Library provides superb reading and student / teacher support for the classroom, and is also highly recommended for schools running Extensive Reading Programmes, offering the right range of books that encourage students to read for pleasure. After dinner we turned the lights out and played 'hide-and-seek'. In the dark, I touched a hand, a very cold hand. Now, because of the game, I had to hide in the dark with... with this cold person — not speaking, not knowing who it was. Slowly the others found us, hid with us, until we were all there — all thirteen. Thirteen? But there were only twelve people in the house! We touched each other in the dark, counting. Thirteen. Quickly, nervously, I lit a match to see...

The Oxford Bookworms Library provides superb reading and student / teacher support for the classroom, and is also highly recommended for schools running Extensive Reading Programmes, offering the right range of books that encourage students to read for pleasure. The Greek island of Corfu lies like a jewel, green and gold, in the Ionian sea, where dolphins swim in the sparkling blue water. What better place for an out-of-work actress to relax for a few weeks? But the island is full of danger and mysteries, and Lucy Waring's holiday is far from peaceful. She meets a rude young man, who seems to have something to hide. Then there is a death by drowning, and then another...

The Oxford Bookworms Library provides superb reading and student / teacher support for the classroom, and is also highly recommended for schools running Extensive Reading Programmes, offering the right range of books that encourage students to read for pleasure. The wind is strong on the Yorkshire moors. There are few trees, and fewer houses, to block its path. There is one house, however, that does not hide from the wind. It stands out from the hill and challenges the wind to do its worst. The house is called Wuthering Heights. When Mr Earnshaw brings a strange, small, dark child back home to Wuthering Heights, it seems he has opened his doors to trouble. He has invited in something that, like the wind, is safer kept out of the house.

A classic and flexible course.

The Oxford Bookworms Library provides superb reading and student / teacher support for the classroom, and is also highly recommended for schools running Extensive Reading Programmes, offering the right range of books that encourage students to read for pleasure. Nick Lortz is sitting outside a café in Whistler, a village in the Canadian mountains, when a stranger comes and sits next to him. She's young, pretty, and has a beautiful smile. Nick is happy to sit and talk with her. But why does she call Nick 'Mr Hollywood'? Why does she give him a big kiss when she leaves? And who is the man at the next table — the man with short white hair? Nick learns the answers to these questions three long days later — in a police station on Vancouver Island.

The Oxford Bookworms Library provides superb reading and student / teacher support for the classroom, and is also highly recommended for schools running Extensive Reading Programmes, offering the right range of books that encourage students to read for pleasure. In EDI (the European Department of Intelligence in Brussels) there are some very secret files — the Omega Files. There are strange, surprising, and sometimes horrible stories in these files, but not many people know about them. You never read about them in the newspapers. Hawker and Jude know all about the Omega Files, because they work for EDI. They think fast, they move fast, and they learn some very strange things. They go all over the world, asking difficult questions in dangerous places, but they don't always find the answers...

The Oxford Bookworms Library provides superb reading and student / teacher support for the classroom, and is also highly recommended for schools running Extensive Reading Programmes, offering the right range of books that encourage students to read for pleasure. England in 1647: King Charles is in prison, and Cromwell's men are fighting the King's men. These are dangerous times for everybody. The four Beverley children have no parents; their mother is dead and their father died while fighting for the King. Now Cromwell's soldiers have come to burn the house — with the children in it. The four of them escape into the New Forest — but how will they live? What will they eat? And will Cromwell's soldiers find them?

The Oxford Bookworms Library provides superb reading and student / teacher support for the classroom, and is also highly recommended for schools running Extensive Reading Programmes, offering the right range of books that encourage students to read for pleasure. On a September day in 1821, in the church of a Yorkshire village, a man and six children stood around a grave. They were burying a woman: the man's wife, the children's mother. The children were all very young, and within a few years the two oldest were dead, too. Close to the wild beauty of the Yorkshire moors, the father brought up his young family. Who had heard of the Brontës of Haworth then? Branwell died while he was still a young man, but the three sisters who were left had an extraordinary gift. They could write marvellous stories — Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Agnes Grey... But Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë did not live to grow old or to enjoy their fame. Only their father was left, alone with his memories.

The Oxford Bookworms Library provides superb reading and student / teacher support for the classroom, and is also highly recommended for schools running Extensive Reading Programmes, offering the right range of books that encourage students to read for pleasure. Oh, how delightful it is to fall in love for the first time! How exciting to go to your first dance when you are a girl of eighteen! But life can also be hard and cruel, if you are young and inexperienced and travelling alone across Europe... or if you are a child from the wrong social class... or a singer without work and the rent to be paid. Set in Europe and New Zealand, these nine stories by Katherine Mansfield dig deep beneath the appearances of life to show us the causes of human happiness and despair.

The Oxford Bookworms Library provides superb reading and student / teacher support for the classroom, and is also highly recommended for schools running Extensive Reading Programmes, offering the right range of books that encourage students to read for pleasure. There are so many things that a mother wishes to teach her daughter. How to lose your innocence but not your hope. How to keep hoping, when hope is your only joy. How to laugh for ever. This is the story of four mothers and their daughters — Chinese-American women, the mothers born in China, and the daughters born in America. Through their eyes we see life in pre-Revolutionary China, and life in downtown San Francisco; women struggling to find a cultural identity that can include a past and a future half a world apart.

- A unique collection of Chekhov's most lyrical stories in a new translation of great skill and originality, published to coincide with the centenary of Chekhov's death. — This translation captures Chekhov's musicality and modernism by paying special attention to his tone and prose rhythm — closer to the Russian while shaping the prose idiomatically. — The stories are arranged chronologically to show the evolution of Chekhov's art and include familiar as well as less well-known works. — Growing interest in Chekhov as a prose writer, evidenced by the attention given to recent publications of Chekhov's previously unpublished work, and the influence he had had on modern writers such as Katherine Mansfield, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver.

'Senneval, you see in me your sister, the girl you seduced at Nancy, the woman who murdered your son, the wife of your own father and the ignoble creature who sent your mother to the gallows...' Who but the Marquis de Sade would write, not of the pain, tragedy, and joy of love but of its crimes? Murder, seduction, and incest are among the cruel rewards for selfless love in his stories; tragedy, despair, and death the inevitable outcome. Sade's villains will stop at nothing to satisfy their depraved passions, and they in turn suffer under the thrall of love. Psychologically astute, and defiantly unconventional, these stories show Sade at his best. A skilled and artful storyteller, he is also an intellectual who asks questions about society, about ourselves, and about life, for which we have yet to find the answers. This new selection includes 'An Essay on Novels', Sade's penetrating survey of the novelist's art.

Turgenev's masterpiece about the conflict between generations is as fresh, outspoken, and exciting today as it was in when it was first published in 1862. The controversial portrait of Bazarov, the energetic, cynical, and self-assured `nihilist' who repudiates the romanticism of his elders, shook Russian society. Indeed the image of humanity liberated by science from age-old conformities and prejudices is one that can threaten establishments of any political or religious persuasion, and is especially potent in the modern era. This new translation, specially commissioned for the World's Classics, is the first to draw on Turgenev's working manuscript, which only came to light in 1988.

This volume contains English translations of: «Ivanov», «The Seagull», «Uncle Vanya», «Three Sisters», and «The Cherry Orchard», with a new Introduction by Ronald Hingley.

»Frankenstein» was Mary Shelley's immensely powerful contribution to the ghost stories which she, Percy Shelley, and Byron wrote one wet summer in Switzerland. Its protagonist is a young student of natural philosophy, who learns the secret of imparting life to a creature constructed from relics of the dead, with horrific consequences. «Frankenstein» confronts some of the most feared innovations of evolutionism: topics such as degeneracy, hereditary disease, and mankind's status as a species of animal. The text used here is from the 1818 edition, which is a mocking exposé of leaders and achievers who leave desolation in their wake, showing mankind its choice — to live cooperatively or to die of selfishness. It is also a black comedy, and harder and wittier than the 1831 version with which we are more familiar. Drawing on new research, Marilyn Butler examines the novel in the context of the radical sciences, which were developing among much controversy in the years following the Napoleonic Wars, and shows how Frankenstein's experiment relates to a contemporary debate between the champions of materialist science and of received religion.

»He talked a lot about the past and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was...» «The Great Gatsby» (1925), F. Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece, stands among the greatest of all American fiction. Jay Gatsby's lavish lifestyle in a mansion on Long Island's gold coast encapsulates the spirit, excitement, and violence of the era Fitzgerald named `the Jazz Age'. Impelled by his love for Daisy Buchanan, Gatsby seeks nothing less than to recapture the moment five years earlier when his best and brightest dreams — his `unutterable visions' — seemed to be incarnated in her kiss. A moving portrayal of the power of romantic imagination, as well as the pathos and courage entailed in the pusuit of an unattainable dream, The Great Gatsby is a classic fiction of hope and disillusion. This edition is fully annotated with a fine Introduction incorporating new interpretation and detailing Fitzgerald's struggle to write the novel, its critical reception and its significance for future generations.