How long does it take to read Island Beneath the Sea?
Island Beneath the Sea by Isabel Allende takes about 9 hours 22 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 9 hours 22 minutes
A week or two of reading
First published 2009. 511 pages, about 140,525 words.
19 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 15 hours 37 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 9 hours 22 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 5 hours 51 minutes |
The page count is the median across 46 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Born a slave on the island of Saint-Domingue, Zarité -- known as Tété -- is the daughter of an African mother she never knew and one of the white sailors who brought her into bondage. Though her childhood is one of brutality and fear, Tété finds solace in the traditional rhythms of African drums and in the voodoo loas she discovers through her fellow slaves. When twenty-year-old Toulouse Valmorain arrives on the island in 1770, it’s with powdered wigs in his baggage and dreams of financial success in his mind. But running his father’s plantation, Saint-Lazare, is neither glamorous nor easy. It will be eight years before he brings home a bride -- but marriage, too, proves more difficult than he imagined. And Valmorain remains dependent on the services of his teenaged slave. Spanning four decades, Island Beneath the Sea is the moving story of the intertwined lives of Tété and Valmorain, and of one woman’s determination to find love amid loss, to offer humanity though her own has been battered, and to forge her own identity in the cruellest of circumstances. Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Sayers Peden.
Subjects: Fiction, Colonies, Social conditions, Slaves, Sugar plantations, Condiciones sociales
