Penguin Readers Level 6: Slumdog Millionaire (ELT Graded Reader)

With carefully adapted text, new illustrations, language practise activities and additional online resources, the Penguin Readers series introduces language learners to bestselling authors and compelling content. Titles include popular classics, exciting contemporary fiction, and thought-provoking non-fiction. Slumdog Millionaire, a Level 6 Reader, is B1+ in the CEFR framework. The longer text is made up of sentences with up to four clauses, introducing future continuous, reported questions, third conditional, was going to and ellipsis. A small number of illustrations support the text. Slumdog Millionaire tells the story of a poor, eighteen-year-old waiter in Mumbai called Ram Mohammad Thomas. Ram goes on a television quiz show, and he answers all the questions correctly. But the people who work on the programme think that he has cheated, so Ram must explain how he knew the answers.

Vikas Swarup is a member of the Indian Foreign Service and is based in Delhi. Q&A has won many awards, and is translated into 40 languages so far. It is the book behind the mult-Oscar winning film, Slumdog Millionaire. His second novel, Six Suspects, is available as a Black Swan paperback and ebook and is soon to be made into a film.