Read Sónnica in Englishwith every sentence explained

Sónnica by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez was first published in 1901. In Passage you read the full text in English, marked intermediate and filed under historical fiction.

A penniless Athenian, the richest woman in Saguntum, and a city on the brink of war.

As the sun sets over the Spanish harbour of Saguntum, a trading ship brings in Actæon, an Athenian who has been soldier, sailor, merchant and poet, and has just lost everything again. The busy port, where Greeks, Iberians, Romans and Carthaginians trade side by side, buzzes with talk of Rome's protection and of Carthaginian armies only a few days' march away.

Sónnica, the wealthy, beautiful owner of the very ship he sailed on, takes an interest in her fellow Athenian and invites him to her villa, a world of gardens, banquets and dancing girls from Gades. But a fierce Celtiberian shepherd Actæon first sees in a waterfront tavern hates Rome with a passion that bodes ill for everyone.

Set on the eve of Hannibal's siege of 219 BC, this 1901 novel by the author of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse brings the ancient Mediterranean to life. This edition is the English translation.

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.