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How long does it take to read Submission?

Michel Houellebecq

Submission by Michel Houellebecq takes about 4 hours 59 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.

About 4 hours 59 minutes

A weekend read

First published 2015. 272 pages, about 74,800 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 19 minutes
Average, 250 words a minute 4 hours 59 minutes
Fast, 400 words a minute 3 hours 7 minutes

The page count is the median across 21 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.

About the book

It’s 2022. François is bored. He’s a middle-aged lecturer at the New Sorbonne University and an expert on J. K. Huysmans, the famed nineteenth-century novelist associated with the Decadent movement. But François’s own decadence is of considerably smaller scale. He sleeps with his students, eats microwave dinners, and watches YouPorn. Meanwhile, it’s election season, and in an alliance with the Socialists, France’s new Islamic party sweeps to power―and Islamic law is instituted. Women are veiled, polygamy is encouraged, and François is offered an irresistible academic advancement―on the condition that he converts to Islam. A darkly comic masterpiece from one of France’s great writers, Submission by Michel Houellebecq has become an international sensation and one of the most discussed novels of our time.

Subjects: Fiction, satire, France, fiction, Political corruption, Religions, Political campaigns, Relations

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