An old prize boar named Old Major calls a meeting of every animal on Manor Farm. Their lives are short and cruel, he tells them, because the human Mr Jones takes everything they produce. Three days later Old Major dies. Three months later the animals chase the drunk Mr Jones off the farm and rename it Animal Farm. The pigs, who can read, take charge.
George Orwell published Animal Farm in August 1945, three months after the end of the war. It is a fable about the Russian Revolution — Old Major is Lenin, the pig Napoleon is Stalin, the rebel pig Snowball is Trotsky — but it survives without that key. The corruption it describes is the corruption of any revolution that wins. By the final chapter, the seven commandments painted on the barn have been reduced to one: All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
Orwell wrote in deliberately plain English. He believed obscure prose was the first sign of dishonest politics. Animal Farm uses one of the smallest vocabularies of any twentieth-century literary novel. Storica's adaptation preserves the seven commandments, the Battle of the Cowshed, Boxer the cart-horse's collapse, and the final scene at the farmhouse window — at B1 across twenty-five chapters.
Orwell believed clear prose was a moral act, and Animal Farm is the cleanest English novel of the twentieth century. Short declarative sentences. Concrete nouns. A small repeated cast. B1 readers — past tense, conditional, ~3,000 words of vocabulary — can read it in the original and lose nothing.
Intermediate. You read narrative past tense fluently, handle dialogue, and understand short novellas. Vocabulary around 3,000 words. Subordinate clauses no longer slow you down.
Yes — every book in the Storica catalog is available in all seven supported languages: French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, and English. Animal Farm was originally written in English, but you choose your reading language when you start.
B1. Intermediate. You read narrative past tense fluently, handle dialogue, and understand short novellas. Vocabulary around 3,000 words. Subordinate clauses no longer slow you down.
About one month at fifteen minutes a day. The adaptation runs to 25 short chapters — short enough to read before bed, long enough to actually move your level.
No. Storica's adaptation is the version you read. We keep the characters, plot beats, and tone of the original — and rewrite the language to fit the level. If you've read the original before, you'll recognise the story; if you haven't, the adaptation is a complete reading of the book.
Pick up where you left off. There are no streaks, no penalties, and no notifications begging you back. Day 12 is still Day 12 a week later.
Animal Farm is rated B1, so we'd suggest starting with one of our A0 or A1 books first if you're brand-new to your target language. Check our shelf at /library/ — the readers there are short, gentle, and built specifically for week one.
Your first 30-day book is free. No card. No streak. Just a passage every morning.
Read it free for 7 days →A small group of readers working through classics in their target language — Kafka in German, Camus in French, Bovary in Spanish. Leave your email and we'll send your invitation.
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