The Best Bilingual Books to Learn English
English is the language everyone half knows — from music, films and the internet — and reading is what turns half-knowledge into the real thing. Our catalog plays to that: every available title is an English original, so you read Twain, Fitzgerald, Wharton and Dickens in their own words, with an aligned translation in German, Spanish or French one glance away. Here are the best picks, sorted by level.
How to pick your level
Every book carries a level tag. Beginner (A2–B1): short sentences and familiar stories. Intermediate (B1–B2): real novels in manageable prose — where most learners belong. Advanced (B2–C1): long sentences, subtle irony, rich vocabulary. Let the free sample decide: read a page of the English side, and if roughly ninety percent lands without a glance across, the level fits. If you peek at every sentence, drop a level — you learn from volume, not from decoding.
For beginners (A2–B1)
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (coming soon) is the classic first English book: short chapters, playful scenes, and Carroll's clear Victorian English underneath all the nonsense. Grimm's Fairy Tales (coming soon) takes the opposite route — tales you may already know by heart, in English translation with the German original alongside, which makes every sentence half familiar before you read it. Available today, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is the friendliest entry point: episodic chapters and lots of everyday dialogue. A Christmas Carol (coming soon) will make a lovely bridge upward: barely over a hundred pages, and you already know the story from countless adaptations — ideal scaffolding for early reading.
For intermediate readers (B1–B2)
This is the strongest shelf in the catalog. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer delivers everyday American English in short adventures. The Great Gatsby is the classic milestone — 180 pages of some of the most admired prose in the language, compact enough to actually finish. Little Women runs on conversation: hundreds of pages of natural family dialogue, the register you will use every day. And when you want a challenge with character, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is narrated in Huck's untamed vernacular — English no textbook will ever show you, with the translation keeping you afloat. Coming soon at this level: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes — twelve self-contained cases, perfect for one mystery per evening — and Pride and Prejudice, whose sparkling dialogue has been charming readers for two centuries.
For advanced readers (B2–C1)
The Age of Innocence is Pulitzer-winning prose: long, elegant sentences and razor-sharp irony — C1 training at its finest. Main Street pairs biting social satire with an enormous stock of everyday vocabulary. A Tale of Two Cities, our newest addition, adds Dickens's rhythmic, endlessly quotable style, available in all six language pairs. And Moby Dick — “Call me Ishmael.” — is the summit, currently offered as the English–Spanish edition. Soon to join this shelf: The Picture of Dorian Gray, with Wilde's epigrams as a masterclass in pointed English.
How to start
Open the free aligned sample on any book page and read a page of the English side — two minutes tell you your level better than any test. Then twenty minutes a day: English first, one glance at the translation when a whole sentence stays dark. Every edition ships as EPUB and PDF, in side-by-side and paragraph layouts, with direct pairs for German, Spanish and French — on an e-reader the paragraph EPUB reads best, on a tablet or in print the two-column layout shines. The full catalog, grouped by level, is below.
Beginner · A2–B1
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Lewis Carroll
A curious girl tumbles down a rabbit hole into a nonsensical world of talking creatures and mad logic.
$1.99 USD
Grimm's Fairy Tales
Jacob & Wilhelm Grimm
The classic German fairy tales — Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel and more — in a bilingual selection.
$3.99 USD
The Adventures of Pinocchio
Carlo Collodi
A wooden puppet comes to life and stumbles through an adventure of mischief and peril on his way to becoming a real boy.
$3.99 USD
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
L. Frank Baum
Dorothy follows the yellow brick road with three unforgettable friends in this clear, adventurous beginner classic.
$3.99 USD
Peter Pan
J. M. Barrie
Wendy and her brothers fly to Neverland with the boy who refuses to grow up in this magical adventure.
$3.99 USD
The Secret Garden
Frances Hodgson Burnett
A lonely girl discovers a locked garden and helps bring a forgotten corner of a Yorkshire manor back to life.
$5.99 USD
The Happy Prince and Other Tales
Oscar Wilde
Five moving fairy tales about kindness, beauty and sacrifice, led by the golden statue of the Happy Prince.
$1.99 USD
Black Beauty
Anna Sewell
A horse tells the story of his life with kind and cruel owners in this enduring plea for compassion.
$3.99 USD
Around the World in Eighty Days
Jules Verne
Phileas Fogg wagers his fortune on circling the globe in eighty days and begins a race against time.
$3.99 USD
A Little Princess
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Sara Crewe loses her fortune but protects her dignity and imagination through hardship at a London school.
$3.99 USD
The Railway Children
E. Nesbit
Three children find adventure, friendship and hope beside a country railway after their father disappears.
$3.99 USD
Aesop's Fables
Aesop
Brief animal stories deliver memorable lessons about human nature, from the tortoise and hare to the boy who cried wolf.
$1.99 USD
Just So Stories
Rudyard Kipling
Playful tales explain how animals got their most famous features, from the camel's hump to the leopard's spots.
$1.99 USD
The Jungle Book
Rudyard Kipling
Mowgli learns the Law of the Jungle among wolves, Baloo and Bagheera in a classic collection of animal adventures.
$3.99 USD
The Wind in the Willows
Kenneth Grahame
Mole, Rat, Badger and reckless Mr Toad share gentle riverbank days and wildly comic adventures.
$3.99 USD
Pollyanna
Eleanor H. Porter
An orphan's habit of finding something to be glad about slowly transforms her stern aunt and an entire town.
$3.99 USD
The Tale of Peter Rabbit and Other Stories
Beatrix Potter
Six gentle animal tales begin with mischievous Peter Rabbit's forbidden visit to Mr McGregor's garden.
Free
English Fairy Tales
Joseph Jacobs
A lively collection of traditional tales including Jack and the Beanstalk, The Three Little Pigs and many more.
$3.99 USD
Der Struwwelpeter
Heinrich Hoffmann
Darkly comic cautionary rhymes about mischievous children who meet wildly exaggerated fates.
$1.99 USD
Die Biene Maja
Waldemar Bonsels
A young bee defies her hive to see the wide world, and must race home to warn of a hornet attack.
$3.99 USD
Heidi
Johanna Spyri
A young orphan blossoms in the Swiss Alps with her gruff grandfather, then works quiet wonders far from the mountains.
$3.99 USD
Intermediate · B1–B2
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Mark Twain
Follow the mischievous Tom Sawyer through his childhood adventures along the Mississippi River in this American classic.
$3.99 USD
The Call of the Wild
Jack London
The gripping story of Buck, a domesticated dog thrust into the brutal life of an Alaskan sled dog during the Klondike Gold Rush.
$1.99 USD
Ethan Frome
Edith Wharton
A tragic tale of forbidden love set against the bleak winter landscape of rural New England.
$3.99 USD
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain
Huck Finn and the escaped slave Jim raft down the Mississippi in this groundbreaking American novel.
$5.99 USD
Little Women
Louisa May Alcott
The heartwarming story of the four March sisters growing up during the American Civil War.
$5.99 USD
My Ántonia
Willa Cather
A luminous portrait of immigrant life on the Nebraska plains, told through the memories of a childhood friend.
$3.99 USD
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The glittering, tragic story of Jay Gatsby and the American Dream in the Roaring Twenties.
$3.99 USD
A Christmas Carol
Charles Dickens
The miserly Ebenezer Scrooge is transformed over one haunted Christmas Eve in Dickens's timeless ghost story of redemption.
$1.99 USD
The Metamorphosis
Franz Kafka
A traveling salesman wakes one morning transformed into a monstrous insect, in Kafka's haunting parable of alienation.
$1.99 USD
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Robert Louis Stevenson
A respected doctor and a monstrous stranger share one terrifying secret in Stevenson's classic tale of the divided self.
Free
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Arthur Conan Doyle
Twelve of the world's most famous detective stories, following Holmes and Watson through Victorian London.
$5.99 USD
Frankenstein
Mary Shelley
A young scientist creates a living being from dead matter — and unleashes a tragedy he cannot control.
$3.99 USD
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen
Elizabeth Bennet and the proud Mr Darcy spar their way toward love in Austen's beloved comedy of manners.
$5.99 USD
Treasure Island
Robert Louis Stevenson
Young Jim Hawkins sets sail in search of buried pirate gold — and must outwit the cunning Long John Silver in the adventure that defined the genre.
$3.99 USD
Anne of Green Gables
Lucy Maud Montgomery
An orphan girl's irrepressible imagination transforms a quiet Nova Scotia farm and everyone around her.
$5.99 USD
She
H. Rider Haggard
Two Englishmen sail into the heart of Africa in search of a two-thousand-year-old sorceress-queen and the secret of immortality.
$3.99 USD
Advanced · B2–C1
The Age of Innocence
Edith Wharton
A Pulitzer Prize-winning portrait of desire and betrayal in 1870s New York high society.
$5.99 USD
Babbitt
Sinclair Lewis
A satirical novel about a middle-class American businessman and his struggle with conformity in the 1920s.
$3.99 USD
Moby Dick
Herman Melville
The epic tale of Captain Ahab's obsessive quest to hunt the great white whale across the world's oceans.
$9.99 USD
Main Street
Sinclair Lewis
A young woman's struggle against the conformity and cultural poverty of small-town American life.
$5.99 USD
The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne
A powerful tale of sin, guilt, and redemption in Puritan Massachusetts.
$5.99 USD
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde
A beautiful young man stays forever youthful while his portrait bears the corruption of his sins.
$3.99 USD
A Tale of Two Cities
Charles Dickens
Dickens's sweeping tale of love, sacrifice and revolution, moving between London and Paris in the shadow of the guillotine.
$5.99 USD
Amerika
Franz Kafka
Sixteen-year-old Karl Roßmann is shipped off to America after a scandal back home, and stumbles into a bewildering New York of chance encounters and dreamlike bureaucracy.
$3.99 USD
Buddenbrooks
Thomas Mann
Four generations of a proud Lübeck merchant dynasty rise, prosper, and slowly come apart.
$9.99 USD
Das Schloß
Franz Kafka
A land surveyor's search for legitimacy in a snowbound village spirals into a parable of bureaucratic futility.
$3.99 USD
Der Golem
Gustav Meyrink
A gem-cutter in Prague's Jewish ghetto is drawn into a hallucinatory web of dreams, doubles, and ancient mysticism.
$3.99 USD
Der Prozess
Franz Kafka
Josef K. is arrested one morning for a crime no one will name, and drawn into a labyrinthine, inaccessible court.
$3.99 USD
Der Tod in Venedig
Thomas Mann
A celebrated writer's trip to Venice dissolves into obsession as a cholera epidemic silently spreads through the city.
$1.99 USD
Der Zauberberg
Thomas Mann
A young engineer visits a Swiss sanatorium for three weeks — and stays for seven years.
$9.99 USD
The Count of Monte Cristo
Alexandre Dumas
Falsely imprisoned for fourteen years, Edmond Dantès reinvents himself as a mysterious count and methodically destroys the men who betrayed him.
$9.99 USD
Tonio Kröger
Thomas Mann
A sensitive, artistic boy spends his life longing for the ordinary blond-and-blue-eyed world he can never fully belong to.
$1.99 USD
Wuthering Heights
Emily Brontë
Catherine Earnshaw and the fierce, tormented Heathcliff are consumed by a love that outlasts death itself, on the wild Yorkshire moors.
$5.99 USD
Jane Eyre
Charlotte Brontë
An orphaned governess finds her voice, her independence, and an impossible love at the brooding Thornfield Hall.
$5.99 USD