Read Het geheimzinnige eiland: De luchtschipbreukelingen in Dutchwith every sentence explained

Het geheimzinnige eiland: De luchtschipbreukelingen by Jules Verne was first published in 1874. In Passage you read the full text in the Dutch translation by Gerard Keller, marked intermediate and filed under science fiction and young adult. It runs to about 70,700 words.

Five men escape a war in a balloon — and fall out of the sky onto an unknown island.

March 1865. During the American Civil War, five prisoners seize a balloon and flee the besieged city of Richmond in the middle of a hurricane: the brilliant engineer Cyrus Smith, the fearless reporter Gideon Spilett, the sailor Pencroff, young Harbert, and the loyal Nab — plus Top, the engineer's dog. After days at the mercy of the storm, they crash onto a deserted island somewhere in the Pacific.

They have nothing: no tools, no weapons, not even a match. Using only knowledge, courage and teamwork, they must make fire, find shelter, forge iron and turn a wild coast into a home. Yet small, puzzling events suggest they may not be entirely alone.

This is the first of the three volumes of Jules Verne's great castaway adventure, complete in itself as the story of how the settlers win their first battle against the wilderness.

Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in Dutch. 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 Dutch 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.