ShelfLook
Tools About
Cover of Slow Man

How long does it take to read Slow Man?

J. M. Coetzee

Slow Man by J. M. Coetzee takes about 4 hours 52 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.

About 4 hours 52 minutes

A weekend read

First published 2004. 265 pages, about 72,875 words.

10 days at 30 minutes a day

Estimate based on 275 words per page.

At other speeds

Slow, 150 words a minute 8 hours 6 minutes
Average, 250 words a minute 4 hours 52 minutes
Fast, 400 words a minute 3 hours 2 minutes

The page count is the median across 24 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.

About the book

A masterful new novel from one of the greatest writers alive. Paul Rayment is on the threshold of a comfortable old age when a calamitous cycling accident results in the amputation of a leg. Humiliated, his body truncated, his life circumscribed, he turns away from his friends. He hires a nurse named Marijana, with whom he has a European childhood in common: hers in Croatia, his in France. Tactfully and efficiently she ministers to his needs. But his feelings for her, and for her handsome teenage son, are complicated by the sudden arrival on his doorstep of the celebrated Australian novelist Elizabeth Costello, who threatens to take over the direction of his life and the affairs of his heart. Unflinching in its vision of suffering and generous in its portrayal of the spirit of care, Slow Man is a masterful work of fiction by one of the world’s greatest writers.

Subjects: Amputees, Fiction, Nurse and patient, Australian Women novelists, Women novelists, Fiction, general

More by J. M. Coetzee

Popular books of similar length