How long does it take to read Gravel Heart?
Gravel Heart by Abdulrazak Gurnah takes about 4 hours 59 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 4 hours 59 minutes
A weekend read
First published 2017. 272 pages, about 74,800 words.
10 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 8 hours 19 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 4 hours 59 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 3 hours 7 minutes |
The page count is the median across 8 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Salim has always known that his father does not want him. Living with his parents and his adored Uncle Amir in a house full of secrets, he is a bookish child, a dreamer haunted by night terrors. It is the 1970s and Zanzibar is changing. Tourists arrive, the island's white sands obscuring the memory of recent conflict--the longed-for independence from British colonialism swiftly followed by bloody revolution. When his father moves out, retreating into disheveled introspection, Salim is confused and ashamed. His mother does not discuss the change, nor does she explain her absences with a strange man; silence is layered on silence. When glamorous Uncle Amir, now a senior diplomat, offers Salim an escape, the lonely teenager travels to London for college. But nothing has prepared him for the biting cold and seething crowds of this hostile city. Struggling to find a foothold, and to understand the darkness at the heart of his family, he must face devastating truths about those closest to him--and about love, sex, and power. Evoking the immigrant experience with unsentimental precision and profound understanding, Gravel Heart is a powerfully affecting story of isolation, identity, belonging, and betrayal, and Abdulrazak Gurnah's most astonishing achievement.
Subjects: Tanzanians, Fiction, London (england), fiction, Fiction, general, Literary
