An Usborne Beginners reader that answers what an earthquake actually is, what one feels like, and why a tsunami follows. Short sentences, large type, and press photographs of real events rather than diagrams alone.

Faults, on pages 6 and 7, opens with an aerial photograph of the San Andreas fault running as a scar across dry California land, with the caption noting that over ten thousand earthquakes happen along its length every year, and cutaway drawings beside it showing rock sections scraping, catching and then slipping. City destruction fills its page with a Japanese city flattened to matchwood, a man in a hard hat picking his way through it, and small drawings of a road split open and a water pipe bursting. Slipping land, on pages 10 and 11, photographs a Chinese hillside stripped bare by a landslide with a house smashed at the bottom of the slope, and explains on the facing page how packed soil comes apart once the ground shakes.

Thirty two pages at about 6.1 by 8.3 inches, measured at Lexile 810L, written by Emily Bone and illustrated by Natalie Hinrichsen. The highest reading level among these five subjects, so it suits a confident reader.

Paperback, 32 pages, 6.1 by 8.3 in (156 by 210 mm), from the Usborne Beginners series. Usborne Publishing Ltd., October 2024. ISBN-13 9781835403990. Publisher age guidance: 4 and up.

Its natural pair on this shelf is Beginners: Volcanoes, which takes the other half of the same story. Look Inside Volcanoes and Earthquakes covers both under more than fifty flaps for a younger reader, and Beginners: Weather is the same series on a different force.

Two more Usborne Beginners readers joined the shelf: Beginners: Trees, on how a tree feeds itself and who lives in one, and Beginners: Storms and Hurricanes, on lightning, dust storms and gales.