Read Sab in Spanishwith every sentence explained

Sab by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda was first published in 1841. In Passage you read the full text in the original Spanish, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction and romance. It runs to about 52,500 words.

A slave in love with his master's daughter. A secret he can never speak.

On a sugar plantation near Puerto Príncipe in colonial Cuba, Sab, a mulatto slave of rare intelligence and nobility, works as overseer for the kindly Don Carlos de B. He has grown up beside Don Carlos's daughter, the sweet, romantic Carlota, and loves her with a silent, hopeless passion. But Carlota is engaged to Enrique Otway, the handsome son of an English merchant, whose family cares far more about her fortune than her heart.

As Enrique arrives at the plantation, Sab must watch the woman he adores give herself to a man unworthy of her. Only Teresa, Carlota's proud and lonely cousin, begins to guess his secret.

Published in 1841 by the Cuban-born Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Sab was the first anti-slavery novel in Spanish, written a decade before Uncle Tom's Cabin, and was banned in Cuba for its daring ideas.

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