Penguin Readers Level 5: Frankenstein (ELT Graded Reader)

Penguin Readers is a graded reading series for English Language Teaching (ELT) markets, designed for teenagers and young adults learning English as a foreign or second language.

Victor Frankenstein wants to make his own creature from stolen body parts. But when the creature is finished, Frankenstein is shocked by his creation and runs away. Lonely and angry, the creature plans to kill his maker and all the people that Frankenstein loves.

Penguin Readers is a series of popular classics, exciting contemporary fiction, and thought-provoking non-fiction, written for learners of English as a foreign language. The series is aligned to the Common European Framework and includes language activities that help develop key skills.

Frankenstein, a Level 5 Reader, is B1 in the CEFR framework. The text is made up of sentences with up to four clauses, introducing present perfect continuous, past perfect, reported speech and second conditional. It is well supported by illustrations, which appear regularly.

About the Author

Mary Shelley (1797-1851), the daughter of pioneering thinkers Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, eloped with the poet Percy Shelley at the age of sixteen. Three years later, during a wet summer on Lake Geneva, Shelley famously wrote her masterpiece, Frankenstein. The years of her marriage were blighted by the deaths of three of her four children, and further tragedy followed in 1822, when Percy Shelley drowned in Italy. Following his death, Mary Shelley returned to England and continued to travel and write until her own death at the age of fifty-three.