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.

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.

Darkest Hour, 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.

It is May 1940. Western countries are falling into Nazi hands. Britain must prepare to be invaded any day. The future of the world lies on the shoulders of one man. This is the story of how British Prime Minister Winston Churchill changed history over twenty-five difficult days during World War II.