Read The Faraway Bride in Englishwith every sentence explained

The Faraway Bride by Stella Benson was first published in 1930. In Passage you read the full text in the original English, marked intermediate and filed under historical fiction and romance.

In the wild gorges of Manchuria, a family of White Russian exiles clings to a world that no longer exists.

Young Seryozha, “a tall indomitable young rock”, trudges behind his father, Old Sergei, on an errand of “rapturously unpleasant duty.” Road and river cross and recross through the narrow gorge, tangled like “the mutual irritation of marriage”, while Seryozha, his dog splashing at his heels, sings his way through a landscape both alien and electric, isolated in his own private universe.

Stella Benson’s The Faraway Bride, published in Britain as Tobit Transplanted, is a witty, luminous retelling of the biblical Book of Tobit. With sharp psychological insight and dazzling descriptions of a wild, flowering frontier, Benson writes about exile, the bonds of family and the search for a future in a land “dark and stormy with color.”

Above all, it is a story about the distance between fathers and sons, and the journeys we take to find a home.

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.