Read Kim in Englishwith every sentence explained

Kim by Rudyard Kipling was first published in 1901. In Passage you read the full text in the original English, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction and young adult. It runs to about 104,500 words.

A street boy in Lahore. A holy man searching for a sacred river. And a secret war between empires.

Kim is the orphaned son of an Irish soldier, but he has grown up on the streets of Lahore in British India, as quick-witted and at home in the bazaars as any local boy. One day, sitting on the great cannon outside the museum, he meets an old Tibetan lama who is searching for a holy river that washes away all sin. Fascinated, Kim decides to become his disciple and follow him on the road.

But before they leave, Kim's friend Mahbub Ali, an Afghan horse-trader, asks him to carry a secret message. Without knowing it, Kim is being drawn into "the Great Game", the spy war between Britain and Russia for control of Central Asia.

Rich with the colours, sounds and people of India, Kim is considered the masterpiece of Nobel Prize winner Rudyard Kipling, a great adventure and a moving story of friendship.

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.