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Albert Einstein himself explains relativity to the general public. To make himself understood, he uses everyday examples: a train running along a platform, two flashes of lightning striking at the same moment, a stone dropped from the window of a railway carriage. You do not need advanced mathematics to follow him, from the speed of light to the curvature of space. At last you understand why time and space are not what we thought, and it is Einstein himself who explains it. Written in a clear style, with short chapters, the book is easy to read in the language you are learning.

In 1859, the philosopher John Stuart Mill asks a simple question: how far does society have the right to control an individual? His answer comes down to one principle: everyone should be able to think, speak and live as they wish, so long as they do no harm to others. Mill defends freedom of speech, even for shocking ideas, and warns against the “tyranny of the majority”. In the age of social media, his arguments help us work out what we can say, and what we should tolerate. With the translation always in front of you, you can read this founding text in the language you are learning.

“I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man.” So begins the confession of a former minor civil servant, bitter and solitary, shut away in a corner of St Petersburg. First he explains, provocatively, why he rejects reason and progress. Then he tells of a humiliating evening with old schoolfellows, and of his meeting with a young woman, Liza. This narrator mocks everything, himself as much as the reader, and yet he fascinates. This book is often seen as the way into Dostoevsky's great novels. With the translation always in front of you, you can read this feverish text in the language you are learning.

On Wall Street, a lawyer takes on a new copyist, Bartleby, a pale, quiet young man who is very diligent at first. One day, when his employer asks him to check a copy with him, Bartleby simply replies: “I would prefer not to.” Then he gives the same answer to every request, without ever leaving the office. Funny and unsettling at once, this short story asks a question you do not forget: what do you do with someone who refuses everything, politely and without anger? His phrase, “I would prefer not to”, has become famous all over the world. You can read the story in one sitting in the language you are learning.

On a feast day at Piraeus, the port of Athens, Socrates and his friends ask what justice is, and whether the just man is happier than the unjust one. To answer, Socrates imagines an ideal city ruled by philosophers. This is where he tells the famous allegory of the cave: chained prisoners take shadows on a wall for reality. For more than two thousand years, this book has fed debates on power, education and truth. It still helps us ask who should govern, and why. With the translation always in front of you, you can read this great dialogue in the language you are learning.

On a fine June morning in London, Clarissa Dalloway is preparing the party she is giving that evening. As the day goes by, marked by the chimes of Big Ben, she thinks back to her youth and to Peter Walsh, the man she did not marry. Elsewhere in the city, Septimus, a former soldier, still carries the war inside him. The whole novel takes place in a single day, and we move from one character to another as if we could hear them think. Its first line, in which Mrs Dalloway says she will buy the flowers herself, has become famous. With the translation always in front of you, you can read this great classic in the language you are learning.

In London, Gabriel Syme, a poet who has secretly become a policeman, manages to get himself elected to the supreme council of Europe's anarchists. Its seven members are each named after a day of the week, and Syme becomes Thursday. There he uncovers a plot, and a huge, terrifying leader whom everyone calls Sunday. Chases, masks falling, reversals: nothing is ever what it seems. It is a spy novel full of humour, which Chesterton himself subtitled “A Nightmare”. Fast-paced from start to finish, the novel is easy to read in the language you are learning.

In the One State, surrounded by a wall, people no longer have names but numbers. They all live by the same timetable, in glass houses where everyone sees everything. D-503, the engineer of a spaceship meant to carry this perfect happiness to other planets, keeps a diary for the people of those planets. Then he meets I-330, a woman who does not follow the rules. Banned in the Soviet Union, this novel is one of the very first great stories about a totalitarian society, and George Orwell read it before writing “Nineteen Eighty-Four”. Written as a diary, in short entries, the novel can be read with the translation always in front of you, in the language you are learning.

Seneca, philosopher and adviser to the Emperor Nero, writes to those close to him to help them live better. The first of these six dialogues argues that life is not short, but that we waste it, busy with everything except living. The others speak of peace of mind, of the happy life and of the wise man's calm in the face of insults. His advice on the use of time and self-control still speaks to today's reader, and many of his sentences are made to be remembered. With the translation always in front of you, you can read this great classic in the language you are learning.

Diogenes Laertius tells the lives and ideas of the philosophers of ancient Greece, from Thales to Epicurus. We see Thales fall into a ditch while gazing at the stars, and Diogenes the Cynic looking for an honest man in broad daylight, lantern in hand, or asking Alexander the Great to stand out of his sun. Funny or surprising, these anecdotes bring the great thinkers close and make them human. We understand what each one thought by seeing how he lived: a lively way into the origins of philosophy. Each life is a story of its own, and the book can be read at your own pace in the language you are learning.

In his laboratory, Dr Raymond operates on the brain of a young girl, Mary, so that she can see the world hidden behind our own, what the ancients called “seeing the god Pan”. Years later, in London, men from good society take their own lives one after another, and each time the same woman seems to have crossed their path. Told in fragments, like an investigation, this short tale builds fear touch by touch. Lovecraft admired it, and it is one of the great classics of supernatural fiction. With the translation always in front of you, you can enjoy the shivers in the language you are learning.

Called out at night in a snowstorm, a country doctor has no horse to make the journey. In a penal colony, an officer proudly shows a visitor a strange execution machine. A hunger artist goes weeks without eating in his cage, while the crowd slowly loses interest. In these three unsettling stories by Kafka, everyday life tips into nightmare without warning, and you do not forget them. Short and written in precise sentences, they can each be read in one sitting in the language you are learning.

Around the year 400, Augustine, now Bishop of Hippo in North Africa, tells the story of his life, speaking directly to God. He remembers his childhood, the pears he stole just for the pleasure of doing wrong, his youth in Carthage and his long search for the truth. Until the day when, in a garden in Milan, he hears a child's voice singing: “Take up and read”. This book is often seen as the first great autobiography of the Western world. We meet a man who doubts, makes mistakes and searches for himself, with a sincerity that still moves us today. With the translation always in front of you, you can read this great classic in the language you are learning.

“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” Rousseau starts from this observation and looks for a form of association in which each person, by uniting with all, obeys only himself. From this pact he draws a simple idea: power belongs to the people, and the law must express the will of all. Against those who based power on force or on divine right, Rousseau bases it on the agreement of citizens. This little book inspired the French Revolution, and it still helps us understand where our ideas of democracy and equality come from. With the translation always in front of you, you can read this founding text in the language you are learning.

In 1845, Henry David Thoreau builds a cabin with his own hands beside Walden Pond, in the woods of Massachusetts, and lives there alone for two years. He grows beans, watches the seasons and the animals, and reduces his needs to the bare essentials. A book that invites you to ask what you really need in order to live. It has become a touchstone for everyone seeking a simpler, freer life, closer to nature. With the translation always in front of you, you can read it chapter by chapter, at your own pace, in the language you are learning.

Three stories by Dostoevsky. In “White Nights”, a lonely young dreamer meets, four evenings in a row in the bright nights of St Petersburg, a young woman who is waiting for someone. In “A Gentle Creature”, a man keeps watch over the body of his young wife and tries to understand. In “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man”, a man in despair falls asleep and has a dream that changes everything. Tender, tragic or visionary, they show another side of the great Russian novelist. You can read each of these short stories in one sitting in the language you are learning.

This collection brings together four of Chekhov's finest stories. In “Ward No. 6”, a provincial doctor starts talking with a patient in his asylum and ends up wondering who is really mad. In “The Lady with the Dog”, a man and a woman, each married to someone else, meet in Yalta and fall into a love they had not foreseen. We also meet a bishop, alone and ill on the eve of Easter, and a young bride-to-be who decides to leave everything behind. Chekhov never judges: in a few pages, he makes you feel a whole life. You can read each of these stories in one sitting in the language you are learning.

This collection brings together three sea stories. In “Youth”, Marlow remembers his first voyage as an officer, on a battered old cargo ship that catches fire on the way to the East. In “Typhoon”, Captain MacWhirr, a man without imagination, takes his steamer into the heart of a terrible storm, with two hundred Chinese labourers in the hold. In “The Secret Sharer”, a young captain hides a stranger on board, a man who swam up to the ship in the middle of the night. Conrad, who was a sailor for twenty years, makes you feel the sea like no one else: the danger, the captain's loneliness, the courage of ordinary men. With the translation always in front of you, you can discover them in the language you are learning.

Father Brown, a small Catholic priest with an absent-minded air, solves cases that baffle the police and the experts, often with his friend Flambeau, a former thief turned detective. A scientist accused of treason in Paris, travellers held up by brigands in the mountains of Italy, an old Cornish family: each puzzle is solved thanks to a detail no one else noticed. Twelve detective stories full of humour and paradox, in which this quiet priest, who knows the human heart well, guesses the truth before anyone else. You can read each story in one sitting in the language you are learning.

In London at the end of the nineteenth century, Adolf Verloc keeps a shady little shop in Soho, where he lives with his wife Winnie and Winnie's simple-minded young brother, Stevie. Secretly, he spies on anarchists for a foreign embassy. One day, his employer demands that he carry out a bomb attack on the Greenwich Observatory. Inspired by a real failed bombing, it is one of the first great novels about terrorism, and still strikingly relevant. With the translation always in front of you, you can read this dark, ironic novel in the language you are learning.

In the nineteenth-century English countryside, Lady Constantine lives alone on her estate while her husband hunts lions in Africa. She has promised him she will see almost no one, and she is bored. At the top of an old tower she finds Swithin St Cleeve, a young man of twenty who watches the sky and dreams of becoming an astronomer. She helps him with his research, and love grows between them, despite the difference in age and rank. Thomas Hardy sets this intimate story beneath the vastness of the starry sky. With the translation always in front of you, this tender novel is a pleasure to read in the language you are learning.

In St Petersburg, Raskolnikov, a very poor former student, lives in a tiny room under the roof. He has convinced himself that certain exceptional men have the right to break the law, and he kills an old pawnbroker with an axe. From then on, fear and fever never leave him, while the cunning and patient magistrate Porfiry seems to read his thoughts. We know from the start who the murderer is, and yet the suspense never lets up: everything happens in his conscience. With the translation always in front of you, you can read this masterpiece by Dostoevsky in the language you are learning.

This fourth volume of the Memoirs from Beyond the Grave covers the years 1815 to 1828. Chateaubriand tells of the Hundred Days, which he spends in Ghent with King Louis XVIII, and of the Battle of Waterloo, which he hears thundering in the distance. Then come Napoleon's exile and death on Saint Helena. Chateaubriand also tells of his own career: ambassador in Berlin and London, then Minister of Foreign Affairs. A witness at the heart of events tells from the inside the fall of Napoleon and the return of the kings, and paints a portrait of his friend Madame Récamier. With the translation always in front of you, you can read these famous memoirs in the language you are learning.

In Paris, Thérèse, a young society woman in a loveless marriage, is bored in her elegant drawing room. On a trip to Florence, the city whose emblem is the red lily, she falls in love with Jacques Dechartre, a sensitive and passionate artist. But Jacques is jealous, and Thérèse's past comes back to haunt him. A great story of love and jealousy under the Tuscan sun, by Anatole France, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. With the translation always in front of you, you can read this beautiful novel in the language you are learning.