Retold: Talk to every story
Any book, read as a chat
Only for iPhone
Free · In‑App Purchases · Designed for iPhone. Not verified for macOS.
iPhone
You read messages all day. Now read Dickens the same way.
Retold lays out a whole book as a chat: every line of dialogue becomes a message with the speaker's name, and the author's narration stays between them. Nothing is rewritten, shortened or simplified — it is the complete text, in the shape you already know by heart.
Then you can talk back.
ASK THE CHARACTERS
Tap a name and ask anything. What did you mean by that? Why did you lie to her? What are you afraid of? Characters answer in their own voice, from inside their own head, in the manner they speak in the book.
THEY KNOW EXACTLY AS MUCH AS YOU DO
The book past your bookmark is never sent to them. Ask on page 40 and you are talking to the character as they are on page 40: still wrong about the things they are wrong about, still keeping their secrets, their ending not yet written. It is the one conversation about a book you cannot have anywhere else — the one you have while you are still in the middle of it.
WHO IS THIS AGAIN?
The narrator is always in the chat. Who is this person? What did I miss? What happened three chapters ago? Come back after two weeks away and get a recap of exactly where you stopped, and not one word further. Nineteenth-century novels with forty characters finally hold together.
CHARACTER CARDS
Tap an avatar for a card: who this person is, how they are tied to everyone else, what they have done so far — written for your page, never for the finished book — with a portrait.
CHAPTER ART
A painting for every chapter, made from what happens in it, resting quietly behind the text.
NEARLY 400 BOOKS, FIFTY FREE FOREVER
Classics picked because they talk: Austen, Dickens, Doyle, Shakespeare, Brontë, Twain, Wilde, Stevenson, and the great Russians — Gogol, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Bulgakov. Three more open for everyone every week; add one during its week and it stays yours for good.
AND THE BOOKS YOU BRING
Open EPUB, FB2, TXT and HTML from your phone and they become chats too, old files in Windows-1251 and other legacy encodings included. A friend sends you a book over AirDrop or Messages and it opens straight into Retold.
READ HOWEVER YOU LIKE
One tap switches to an ordinary book layout. Bookmarks with a swipe, progress for every chapter, three font sizes, and everything works offline once a book is on your phone.
READER+
• The whole library and every weekly book, for good
• Character cards with portraits
• A painting for every chapter
• 300 questions a month instead of 40, the first 150 on our smartest model
Reader+ is an auto-renewing subscription: $4.99 a month or $29.99 a year, with a 7-day free trial. Payment is charged to your Apple ID account at confirmation of purchase. The subscription renews automatically unless cancelled at least 24 hours before the end of the current period. Manage or cancel in your App Store account settings.
Every book in the Retold library is in the public domain. Answers from characters and the narrator are generated by AI from the part of the book you have read; they are a companion to the book, never a substitute for it.
Privacy policy: https://retold-site.vercel.app/privacy
Terms of use: https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/
Ratings & Reviews
- This app hasn’t received enough ratings or reviews to display an overview.
What's new in 1.0.2
• A clearer subscription screen: the price you pay is shown up front, and the 7-day free trial is listed only when it is actually on offer.
• Chapter recaps now always match the book and the edition you are reading. Some Russian books could previously show recaps from another title.
• Faster start with a large library: the book you were reading opens first, the rest load in the background.
• Two editions of the same book no longer replace each other: each keeps its own bookmark and notes.
• Characters and the narrator stay focused on the book you are reading.
• Clearer messages when a monthly or daily question limit is reached.
• Security and reliability improvements.
The developer, Sergey Li, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .
Data Linked to You
The following data may be collected and linked to your identity:
- Purchases
- Contact Info
- Identifiers
- Usage Data
Accessibility
The developer has not yet indicated which accessibility features this app supports. Learn More
Information
- Seller
- Sergey Li
- Size
- 33.8 MB
- Category
- Books
- Compatibility
Requires iOS 15.0 or later.
- iPhone
Requires iOS 15.0 or later. - iPod touch
Requires iOS 15.0 or later. - Mac
Requires macOS 12.0 or later and a Mac with Apple M1 chip or later. - Apple Vision
Requires visionOS 1.0 or later.
- iPhone
- Languages
- English
- Age Rating
4+
- 4+
- In-App Purchases
Yes
- Reader+ Yearly $29.99
- Reader+ Monthly $4.99
- Copyright
- © 2026 AlienMinds