Oxford Bookworms Library

Oxford Bookworms Library Stage 6 Gazing at Stars: Stories from Asia

Retold by Clare West

STAGE 6 - World Stories

How fair is fair trade? When the American models leave the Malaysian island after their fashion shoot, they take away more than just photographs, and leave behind a family that will never be the same again.

Bookworms World Stories collect stories written in English from around the world. These stories from China, India, Malaysia, and Singapore, are by writers Lui Hong, Attia Hosain, Preeta Samarasan, Hwee Hwee Tan, Ridjal Noor, Shashi Deshpande, Ovidia Yu, Nora Adam, Nirupama Subramanian, and Catherine Lim.

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Oxford Bookworms Library

E. M. Forster

STAGE 6 - Classics

A mysterious incident at the Marabar Caves, involving Adela Quested, newly arrived from England, and Dr Aziz, an Indian doctor, leads to a drama that divides the British and Indian communities in anger, distrust, and fear.
Forsters great novel brings to life all the dangers and misunderstandings of colonialism but, as Forster himself wrote, the story is about something wider than politics, about the search of the human race for a more lasting home, about the universe as embodied in the Indian earth and the Indian sky, about the horror lurking in the Marabar Caves...

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Oxford Bookworms Library

Pack contains one copy of each of the following eight titles:

Brat Farrar
David Copperfield
Deadlock
Far from the Madding Crowd
Ghost Stories
Great Expectations
Sense and Sensibility
Wuthering Heights

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Oxford Bookworms Library

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Retold by Clare West

STAGE 5 - Human Interest

Heat and dust - these simple, terrible words describe the Indian summer. Year after year, endlessly, it is the same. And everyone who experiences this heat and dust is changed for ever.

We often say, in these modern times, that sexual relationships have changed, for better or for worse. But in this book we see that things have not changed. Whether we look back sixty years, or a hundred and sixty, we see that it is not things that change, but people. And, in the heat and dust of an Indian summer, even people are not very different after all.

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Oxford Bookworms Library

Erskine Childers
Retold by Peter Hawkins

STAGE 5 - Thriller & Adventure

When Carruthers joins his friend Arthur Davies on his yacht Dulcibella, he is expecting a pleasant sailing holiday in the Baltic Sea. But the holiday turns into an adventure of a different kind. He and Davies soon find themselves sailing in the stormy waters of the North Sea, exploring the channels and sandbanks around the German Frisian Islands, and looking for a secret - a secret that could mean great danger for England.

Erskine Childers' novel, published in 1903, was the first great modern spy story, and is still as exciting to read today as it was a hundred years ago.

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Oxford Bookworms Library

Retold by Clare West

STAGE 5 - World Stories

'At home we started with an innocent life. Walking home from village dances across pale wet fields, looking at birds on the moonlit lake, playing a tune across the water in the early morning with no other sound in the clear cold air.'

Innocence and experience, loss and longing, humour and sadness run hand in hand through these stories.

The stories in this volume of World Stories are by Irish writers Brian Friel, Edna O'Brien, William Trevor, Lorcan Byrne, Frank O'Connor, Claire Keegan, Eamonn Sweeney, and Somerville & Ross.

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Oxford Bookworms Library

Pack contains one copy of each of the following eight titles:

American Crime Stories
Cry Freedom
The Enemy
Jane Eyre
Night Without End
Oliver Twist
Pride and Prejudice
Tess of the d'Urbervilles

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Oxford Bookworms Library

P.G. Wodehouse
Retold by Clare West

STAGE 5 - Human Interest

What on earth would Bertie Wooster do without Jeeves, his valet? Jeeves is calm, tactful, resourceful, and has the answer to every problem. Bertie, a pleasant young man but a bit short of brains, turns to Jeeves every time he gets into trouble. And Bertie is always in trouble.

These six stories include the most famous of P. G. Wodehouse's memorable characters. There are three stories about Bertie and Jeeves, and three about Lord Emsworth, who, like Bertie, is often in trouble, battling with his fierce sister Lady Constance, and his even fiercer Scottish gardener, the red-bearded Angus McAllister . . .

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Oxford Bookworms Library

Evelyn Waugh
Retold by Clare West

STAGE 6 - Human Interest

After a wild, drunken party, Paul Pennyfeather is forced to leave Oxford and begin a new life out in the wide world. His experiences take him from a boys' private school in Wales, where he meets some rather strange people, to a life of luxury in a grand country house and the Ritz Hotel, and then to seven years' hard labour in prison. Where will it all end?

The black humour of this story about English society in the 1920s is as fresh today as it was when the novel was first written.

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