Read The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare in Englishwith every sentence explained

The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare by G. K. Chesterton was first published in 1908. In Passage you read the full text in the original English, marked advanced and filed under fantasy, mystery and crime and thriller and suspense.

Seven anarchists, each named after a day of the week. One of them is a policeman.

In the red-brick London suburb of Saffron Park, the poet Gabriel Syme argues with Lucian Gregory, a red-haired poet who swears he is a real anarchist. To prove it, Gregory leads Syme to a secret hall hidden under a pub, where a seat is about to be filled on the Central Anarchist Council. But Syme is a detective in disguise, and a daring speech wins the seat of Thursday for himself.

Now he must sit at breakfast with men sworn to destroy the world, under the eye of their huge and terrifying president, Sunday. Duels, chases and disguises follow at a breathless pace, and nothing is quite what it seems.

Published in 1908, G. K. Chesterton's comic, dreamlike thriller is one of the strangest and funniest spy stories ever written, and its wild finale still surprises readers.

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.