Read Gay-Neck: The Story of a Pigeon in Englishwith every sentence explained

Gay-Neck: The Story of a Pigeon by Dhan Gopal Mukerji was first published in 1927. In Passage you read the full text in the original English, marked beginner and filed under children and historical fiction. It runs to about 37,700 words.

One boy. One pigeon. From the rooftops of Calcutta to the battlefields of France.

In Calcutta, where every third boy keeps pigeons, a young narrator raises a chick with a shimmering, rainbow-coloured throat. He names him Chitra-griva, "Gay-Neck", and trains him to fly home from ever greater distances, until the bird is the finest carrier pigeon in the city.

Together with his friend Radja and old Ghond, a hunter who knows every secret of the jungle, the boy takes Gay-Neck into the Himalayas, where hawks and eagles rule the sky and a pigeon must use all his courage and cleverness to survive. But a far greater test lies ahead, when the world goes to war and Gay-Neck is called to carry messages under fire.

Told with warmth and a deep love of nature, Gay-Neck: The Story of a Pigeon won the Newbery Medal in 1928 and remains a moving tale of friendship and courage.

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 beginner, so it's a good first whole book if you know the basics of English and want something you can finish. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.