Read War and Peace in Englishwith every sentence explained

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy was first published in 1869. In Passage you read the full text in English, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction.

St. Petersburg, 1805. Everyone is talking about Napoleon. Soon he will change all their lives.

The story opens at a fashionable soirée where the guests gossip about Bonaparte and war. Among them are the awkward, warm-hearted Pierre Bezukhov, the illegitimate son of one of Russia's richest noblemen, and his friend Prince Andrew Bolkonsky, bored with society and with his young wife, and eager to find meaning on the battlefield. In Moscow, the noisy, generous Rostov family celebrates a name day, and their lively young daughter Natasha bursts into the room.

As Russia goes to war, these families are drawn into the campaign that leads to Austerlitz and into the drawing rooms of the capitals: into love affairs, quarrels over inheritances and the search for a life worth living.

Tolstoy's vast novel, complete here with both epilogues, follows its characters across fifteen years of history. It is often named the greatest novel ever written, and has inspired films, an opera and several television series.

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.