Read A Tale of Two Cities in Englishwith every sentence explained

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens was first published in 1859. In Passage you read the full text in the original English, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction and romance. It runs to about 135,400 words.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

In 1775, a London banker travels to Paris to bring home a man "recalled to life": Doctor Manette, freed after eighteen years as a secret prisoner in the Bastille. His gentle daughter Lucie, who believed him dead, nurses him back from the edge of madness.

Their fates soon become tangled with two very different men: Charles Darnay, a French aristocrat who has turned his back on his cruel family, and Sydney Carton, a brilliant, cynical English lawyer who has wasted his life. Meanwhile, in the wine shops of the Paris slums, Madame Defarge sits knitting — and quietly keeping a record of everyone who will pay when the Revolution comes.

Set between London and Paris, Dickens's gripping historical novel is one of the best-selling books of all time.

Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in English. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:

• a natural translation of that exact sentence,
• a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
• the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
• all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.

It's marked advanced, with richer vocabulary and longer sentences. If it feels heavy, start with an intermediate English book and come back to it. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.