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How long does it take to read Cloud Atlas?

David Mitchell

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell takes about 9 hours 58 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.

About 9 hours 58 minutes

A week or two of reading

First published 2004. 544 pages, about 149,600 words.

20 days at 30 minutes a day

Estimate based on 275 words per page.

At other speeds

Slow, 150 words a minute 16 hours 37 minutes
Average, 250 words a minute 9 hours 58 minutes
Fast, 400 words a minute 6 hours 14 minutes

The page count is the median across 41 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.

About the book

From David Mitchell, the Booker Prize nominee, award-winning writer and one of the featured authors in Granta’s “Best of Young British Novelists 2003” issue, comes his highly anticipated third novel, a work of mind-bending imagination and scope. A reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific in 1850; a disinherited composer blagging a precarious livelihood in between-the-wars Belgium; an ambitious journalist in Governor Reagan’s California; a vanity publisher fleeing the mendicant and violent family of his star author; a genetically modified “dinery server” on death-row; and Zachry, a young Pacific Islander witnessing the nightfall of science and civilisation -- the narrators of Cloud Atlas hear each other’s echoes down the corridor of history, and their destinies are changed in ways great and small. In his captivating third novel, David Mitchell erases the boundaries of language, genre and time to offer a meditation on humanity’ s dangerous will to power, and where it may lead us

Content warnings (AI-checked, may be incomplete)
  • violence

How these are chosen

Subjects: Fate and fatalism, Fiction, Reincarnation, Fantasy, Fantasy fiction, Imaginary Voyages

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