How long does it take to read Crossing the River?
Caryl Phillips
Crossing the River by Caryl Phillips takes about 4 hours 21 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 4 hours 21 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1993. 237 pages, about 65,175 words.
9 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 7 hours 15 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 4 hours 21 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 2 hours 43 minutes |
The page count is the median across 7 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
From the acclaimed author of Cambridge comes an ambitious, formally inventive, and intensely moving evocation of the scattered offspring of Africa. It begins in a year of failing crops and desperate foolishness, which forces a father to sell his three children into slavery. Employing a brilliant range of voices and narrative techniques, Caryl Phillips folows these exiles across the river that separates continents and centuries. Phillips's characters include a freed slave who journeys to Liberia as a missionary in the 1830s; a pioneer woman seeking refuge from the white man's justice on the Colorado frontier; and an African-American G.I. who falls in love with a white Englishwoman during World War II. Together these voices make up a "many-tongued chorus" of common memory—and one of the most stunning works of fiction ever to address the lives of black people severed from their homeland.
Subjects: Slave traders, Slaves, African Americans, African American families, Fiction, Historical fiction
