How long does it take to read Jackdaws?
Jackdaws by Ken Follett takes about 9 hours 17 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 9 hours 17 minutes
A week or two of reading
First published 2001. 506 pages, about 139,150 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 28 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 9 hours 17 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 5 hours 48 minutes |
The page count is the median across 32 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
D-Day is approaching. They don’t know where or when, but the Germans know it’ll be soon, and for Felicity “Flick” Clariet, the stakes have never been higher. A senior agent in the ranks of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) responsible for sabotage, Flick has survived to become one of Britain’s most effective operatives in Northern France. She knows that the Germans’ ability to thwart the Allied attack depends upon their lines of communications, and in the days before the invasion no target is of greater strategic importance than the largest telephone exchange in Europe. But when Flick and her Resistance-leader husband try a direct, head-on assault that goes horribly wrong, her world turns upside down. Her group destroyed, her husband missing, her superiors unsure of her, her own confidence badly shaken, she has one last chance at the target, but the challenge, once daunting, is now near impossible. The new plan requires an all-woman team, none of them professionals, to be assembled and trained within days. Code-named the Jackdaws, they will attempt to infiltrate the exchange under the noses of the Germans—but the Germans are waiting for them now and have plans of their own. There are secrets Flick does not know—secrets within the German ranks, secrets among her hastily recruited team, secrets among those she trusts the most. And as the hours tick down to the point of no return, most daunting of all, there are secrets within herself. . .
Subjects: War stories, Female Participation, Fiction, Secret service, Underground movements, Women in war