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How long does it take to read Stormy Petrel?

Mary Stewart

Stormy Petrel by Mary Stewart takes about 4 hours 15 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.

About 4 hours 15 minutes

A weekend read

First published 1991. 232 pages, about 63,800 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 5 minutes
Average, 250 words a minute 4 hours 15 minutes
Fast, 400 words a minute 2 hours 40 minutes

The page count is the median across 16 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.

About the book

Rose Fenemore is taking a break from her Cambridge teaching post to meet her brother Crispin on the island of Moila off the west coast of Scotland. She looks forward to a quiet holiday in a natural paradise of seabirds and wild flowers. But things do not turn out so idyllically. Her brother's arrival is delayed, and the island's peace is shattered by the appearance one night of two men seeking shelter from a violent summer storm--men whose conflicting stories draw Rose into a web of menace and suspicion. Ewen Mackay claims to have grown up in the cottage. John Parsons also rouses Rose's skepticism...and more tender feelings as well. Rose's discovery of the stormy petrels--the fragile, elusive birds who nest ashore but spend most of their lives flying close above the sea waves--comes to symbolize the confusion she feels about Ewen Mackay, the man known as the island's prodigal son, and the man calling himself John Parsons, whose account of himself Rose has every reason to distrust.

Subjects: Fiction, gothic, Islands, Fiction, Storms, Love stories, Women

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