Read Kidnapped in Englishwith every sentence explained

Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson was first published in 1886. In Passage you read the full text in the original English, marked intermediate and filed under historical fiction, thriller and suspense and young adult. It runs to about 79,600 words.

Betrayed by his own uncle. Sold onto a ship. Hunted across the Highlands.

Scotland, 1751. Young David Balfour has lost both his parents and sets out with a letter to his uncle Ebenezer, hoping for a home and an inheritance. Instead he finds a cold, crumbling house and a miser who wants him gone, and before long David wakes up a prisoner aboard a ship bound for the American colonies.

At sea he meets Alan Breck Stewart, a proud and dangerous Highlander loyal to the defeated Jacobite cause. The two could not be more different, but soon they are running for their lives together through the wild hills and heather, with redcoat soldiers on their trail.

From the author of Treasure Island, Kidnapped is one of the great adventure stories, full of storms, sword fights and a friendship you won't forget.

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.