Read Heart of Darkness in Englishwith every sentence explained

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad was first published in 1899. In Passage you read the full text in the original English, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction and thriller and suspense. It runs to about 37,900 words.

A river into the unknown. A man no one can explain. A journey to the edge of the human soul.

As night falls over the River Thames, a sailor named Marlow tells his companions a story. Years ago, he took a job with a European trading company as captain of a steamboat in Africa. What he found there was not adventure but cruelty, chaos and greed: men dying in the shade, ivory piled high, and company agents who cared only for profit.

Everyone he meets talks about one man: Kurtz, the company's most brilliant agent, who sends back more ivory than all the others together and lives somewhere deep in the interior. As Marlow's battered boat moves slowly up the river towards him, the jungle closes in, and the question grows: who is Kurtz, and what has he become?

Short, intense and endlessly debated, Joseph Conrad's 1899 novella is a landmark of modern literature and inspired the film Apocalypse Now.

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.