Read The Thirty-Nine Steps in Englishwith every sentence explained

The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan was first published in 1915. In Passage you read the full text in the original English, marked intermediate and filed under mystery and crime and thriller and suspense.

A bored man. A dead body. A race to prevent a world war.

Richard Hannay has made his pile in Rhodesia and come home to London, only to find himself "the best bored man in the United Kingdom." Then a jittery American from the flat upstairs, Scudder, slips through his door with a tale of a plot to assassinate a European statesman and plunge the continent into war.

Soon Scudder lies dead on Hannay's floor with a knife through his heart, and Hannay is the obvious suspect. With Scudder's coded notebook in his pocket, he boards a train north and vanishes into the wild moors of Galloway, hunted by the police and by a ruthless ring of enemy agents. To clear his name and stop a catastrophe, he must work out what Scudder meant by "the thirty-nine steps."

A masterpiece of suspense, this is the original man-on-the-run thriller that defined the espionage genre.

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.