Read Tres novelas ejemplares y un prólogo in Spanishwith every sentence explained

Tres novelas ejemplares y un prólogo by Miguel de Unamuno was first published in 1920. In Passage you read the full text in the original Spanish, marked intermediate and filed under historical fiction and romance. It runs to about 27,400 words.

Three people who want everything. Three stories about the terrible strength of the will.

In these short, intense novellas Unamuno strips away scenery to leave his characters face to face with their desires. In Two Mothers, Raquel, a widow who cannot have children, holds her lover Juan in an iron grip and steers him into marriage with the gentle Berta, because she has decided the child will be hers. The Marquis of Lumbría opens the shuttered mansion of an old nobleman desperate for a male heir, where his two daughters wage a silent war.

In the most famous, Nothing Less Than a Whole Man, beautiful Julia, the pride of her town, is about to be sold into marriage by her debt-ridden father. The buyer is Alejandro Gómez, a mysterious self-made millionaire who claims he fears nothing and needs no one.

Introduced by a provocative prologue on what makes a character real, this book is a staple of Spanish literature courses, and its final story has been filmed more than once.

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 intermediate: comfortable once everyday Spanish 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.