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How long does it take to read Foreign Affairs?

Alison Lurie

Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie takes about 5 hours 20 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.

About 5 hours 20 minutes

A weekend read

First published 1984. 291 pages, about 80,025 words.

11 days at 30 minutes a day

Estimate based on 275 words per page.

At other speeds

Slow, 150 words a minute 8 hours 54 minutes
Average, 250 words a minute 5 hours 20 minutes
Fast, 400 words a minute 3 hours 20 minutes

The page count is the median across 12 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.

About the book

Virginia Miner, a fifty-something, unmarried tenured professor, is in London to work on her new book about children’s folk rhymes. Despite carrying a U.S. passport, Vinnie feels essentially English and rather looks down on her fellow Americans. But in spite of that, she is drawn into a mortifying and oddly satisfying affair with an Oklahoman tourist who dresses more Bronco Billy than Beau Brummel. Also in London is Vinnie’s colleague Fred Turner, a handsome, flat broke, newly separated, and thoroughly miserable young man trying to focus on his own research. Instead, he is distracted by a beautiful and unpredictable English actress and the world she belongs to. Both American, both abroad, and both achingly lonely, Vinnie and Fred play out their confused alienation and dizzying romantic liaisons in Alison Lurie’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Smartly written, poignant, and witty, Foreign Affairs remains an enduring comic masterpiece.

Subjects: Fiction, general, Fiction, action & adventure, Fiction, romance, general, English fiction, Middle-aged women, Fiction

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