The war of the worlds

About the book

When an object from Mars lands near an English town, curiosity draws spectators towards something they do not understand. The encounter rapidly overturns ordinary expectations of safety, military strength, and humanity's place in the natural world. Wells follows a narrator trying to move through disrupted communities while information arrives unevenly and established authorities struggle to respond. Streets, houses, fields, and transport routes become charged with unfamiliar danger. The novel combines immediate survival with uncomfortable comparisons between the invaders' conduct and human forms of domination. Its terror comes partly from the disproportion between everyday concerns and the scale of the event. Even amid spectacular destruction, the narrative remains interested in how individuals explain catastrophe, help one another, or retreat into private schemes.

• Invasion and empire
• Human vulnerability
• Survival

Why read it

For an invasion story that makes both familiar places and human assumptions newly strange.

English text