How long does it take to read A Widow for One Year?
A Widow for One Year by John Irving takes about 10 hours 51 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 10 hours 51 minutes
A week or two of reading
First published 1998. 592 pages, about 162,800 words.
22 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 18 hours 5 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 10 hours 51 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 6 hours 47 minutes |
The page count is the median across 23 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
“One night when she was four and sleeping in the bottom bunk of her bunk bed, Ruth Cole woke to the sound of lovemaking—it was coming from her parents’ bedroom.” This sentence opens John Irving’s ninth novel, A Widow for One Year, a story of a family marked by tragedy. Ruth Cole is a complex, often self-contradictory character—a “difficult” woman. By no means is she conventionally “nice,” but she will never be forgotten. Ruth’s story is told in three parts, each focusing on a critical time in her life. When we first meet her—on Long Island, in the summer of 1958—Ruth is only four. The second window into Ruth’s life opens on the fall of 1990, when she is an unmarried woman whose personal life is not nearly as successful as her literary career. She distrusts her judgment in men, for good reason. A Widow for One Year closes in the autumn of 1995, when Ruth Cole is a forty-one-year-old widow and mother. She’s about to fall in love for the first time. Richly comic, as well as deeply disturbing, A Widow for One Year is a multilayered love story of astonishing emotional force. Both ribald and erotic, it is also a brilliant novel about the passage of time and the relentlessness of grief.
Subjects: Fiction, Women novelists in fiction, Women novelists, Single mothers in fiction, Widows in fiction, Widows
