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How long does it take to read Shades of Grey?

Jasper Fforde

Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde takes about 7 hours 15 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.

About 7 hours 15 minutes

A weekend read

First published 2008. 395 pages, about 108,625 words.

15 days at 30 minutes a day

Estimate based on 275 words per page.

At other speeds

Slow, 150 words a minute 12 hours 4 minutes
Average, 250 words a minute 7 hours 15 minutes
Fast, 400 words a minute 4 hours 32 minutes

The page count is the median across 12 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.

About the book

An astonishing, hotly anticipated new novel from the great literary fantasist and creator of Thursday Next, Jasper Fforde. As long as anyone can remember, society has been ruled by a Colortocracy. From the underground feedpipes that keep the municipal park green to the healing hues viewed to cure illness to a social hierarchy based upon one's limited color perception, society is dominated by color. In this world, you are what you can see.Young Eddie Russett has no ambition to be anything other than a loyal drone of the Collective. With his better-than-average red perception, he could well marry Constance Oxblood and inherit the string works; he may even have enough red perception to make prefect.For Eddie, life looks colorful. Life looks good.But everything changes when he moves with his father, a respected swatchman, to East Carmine. There, he falls in love with a Grey named Jane who opens his eyes to the painful truth behind his seemingly perfect, rigidly controlled society.Curiosity—a dangerous trait to display in a society that demands total conformity—gets the better of Eddie, who beings to wonder:Why are there not enough spoons to go around?Why is everything—and everyone—barcoded?What happened to all the people who never returned from High Saffron?And why, when you begin to question the world around you, do black-and- white certainties reduce themselves to shades of grey?Part satire, part romance, part revolutionary thriller, this is the new world from the creative and comic genius of Jasper Fforde.

Subjects: Color blindness, Social structure, Fiction, Social classes, Colors, Fiction, romance, fantasy

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