How long does it take to read Reading in the Dark?
Seamus Deane
Reading in the Dark by Seamus Deane takes about 4 hours 17 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 4 hours 17 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1996. 234 pages, about 64,350 words.
9 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 7 hours 9 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 4 hours 17 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 2 hours 41 minutes |
The page count is the median across 5 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Seamus Deane's first novel is a mesmerizing story of childhood set against the violence of Northern Ireland in the 1940s and 1950s. The boy narrator grows up haunted by a truth he both wants and does not want to discover. The matter: a deadly betrayal, unspoken and unspeakable, born of political enmity. As the boy listens through the silence that surrounds him, the truth spreads like a stain until it engulfs him and his family. And as he listens, and watches, the world of legend - the stone fort of Grianan, home of the warrior Fianna; the Field of the Disappeared, over which no gulls fly - reveals its transfixing reality. Meanwhile the real world of adulthood unfolds its secrets like a collection of folktales: the dead sister walking again; the lost uncle, Eddie, present on every page; the family house "as cunning and articulate as a labyrinth, closely designed, with someone sobbing at the heart of it." Seamus Deane has created a luminous tale about how childhood fear turns into fantasy and fantasy turns into fact.
Subjects: Fiction, Children, Politics and government, Legends, Fiction, general, Northern ireland, fiction
