How long does it take to read Beyond Black?
Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel takes about 8 hours 16 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 8 hours 16 minutes
A week or two of reading
First published 2005. 451 pages, about 124,025 words.
17 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 13 hours 47 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 8 hours 16 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 5 hours 10 minutes |
The page count is the median across 14 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Alison Hart is a medium by trade: dead people talk to her, and she talks back. With her flat-eyed, flint-hearted sidekick, Colette, she tours the dormitory towns of London's orbital road, passing on messages from dead ancestors: 'Granny says she likes your new kitchen units.' Alison's ability to communicate with spirits is a torment rather than a gift. Behind her plump, smiling and bland public persona is a desperate woman. She knows that the next life holds terrors that she must conceal from her clients. Her days and nights are haunted by the men she knew in her childhood, the thugs and petty criminals who preyed upon her hopeless, addled mother, Emmie. They infiltrate her house, her body and her soul; the more she tries to be rid of them, the stronger and nastier they become. This tenth novel by Hilary Mantel is a witty and deeply sinister story of dark secrets and forces, set in an England that jumps at its own shadow, a country whose banal self-absorption is shot through by fear of the engulfing dark.
Subjects: Spiritualists, Divorced women, Women mediums, Fiction, Drama, Female friendship
