Read Michel Strogoff in Frenchwith every sentence explained

Michel Strogoff by Jules Verne was first published in 1876. In Passage you read the full text in the original French, marked intermediate and filed under historical fiction, thriller and suspense and young adult. It runs to about 102,000 words.

One message. Five thousand kilometres of enemy land. No one must know who he is.

During a glittering ball in Moscow, the Tsar receives terrible news: Tartar hordes led by the Emir Feofar-Khan have invaded Siberia and cut the telegraph line. Worse, the traitor Ivan Ogareff plans to deliver the city of Irkutsk to the enemy, where the Tsar's own brother is trapped.

Only a courier can get through. The Tsar chooses Michael Strogoff, a young officer born in Siberia, strong, loyal and fearless. Travelling in disguise as a merchant, he must cross rivers, steppes and burning villages without ever revealing his mission. On the road he meets Nadia, a brave young woman with her own reasons for going east, and two rival journalists chasing the story of the war.

Michael Strogoff is one of Jules Verne's most exciting novels, a non-stop race against time and a huge success on stage and screen.

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