Read Don Quixote in Englishwith every sentence explained

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes was first published in 1605. In Passage you read the full text in English, marked intermediate and filed under historical fiction.

He has read too many books of chivalry. Now he means to live one.

In a village of La Mancha, a lean gentleman of nearly fifty sells off his fields to buy tales of knights-errant and reads until his wits give way. He scours his great-grandfather's rusty armour, names his bony nag Rocinante, chooses a farm girl to adore as the peerless Dulcinea del Toboso, and rides out as Don Quixote to right the wrongs of the world.

Soon he persuades a simple neighbour, Sancho Panza, to follow him as squire with the promise of an island to govern. Inns become castles, windmills become giants, flocks of sheep become armies, and nearly every adventure leaves the pair bruised, hungry and arguing by the roadside. Yet the knight's madness keeps throwing off flashes of real wisdom.

Both parts of Cervantes's comic epic are here, in John Ormsby's classic English translation. Often called the first modern novel, Don Quixote gave the world the word "quixotic."

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 intermediate: comfortable once everyday English feels familiar, with the harder sentences one tap away. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.