How long does it take to read Names for the Sea?
Names for the Sea by Sarah Moss takes about 6 hours 34 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 6 hours 34 minutes
A weekend read
First published 2012. 358 pages, about 98,450 words.
14 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 10 hours 56 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 6 hours 34 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 4 hours 6 minutes |
The page count is the median across 4 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Novelist Sarah Moss had a childhood dream of moving to Iceland, sustained by a wild summer there when she was nineteen. In 2009, she saw an advertisement for a job at the University of Iceland and applied on a whim, despite having two young children and a comfortable life in an English cathedral city. The resulting adventure was shaped by Iceland's economic collapse, which halved the value of her salary, by the eruption of Eyjafjallajokull and by a collection of new friends, including a poet who saw the only bombs fall on Iceland in 1943, a woman who speaks to elves and a chef who guided Sarah's family around the intricacies of Icelandic cuisine. Sarah was drawn to the strangeness of Icelandic landscape, and explored hillsides of boiling mud, volcanic craters and fissures, and the unsurfaced roads that link remote farms and fishing villages in the far north. She walked the coast path every night after her children were in bed, watching the northern lights and the comings and goings of migratory birds. As the weeks and months went by, the children settled in local schools and Sarah got to know her students and colleagues, she and her family learned new ways to live.
Subjects: Social life and customs, Homes and haunts, Description and travel, Family, Anecdotes, Travel writing
