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How long does it take to read The Bad Girl?

Mario Vargas Llosa

The Bad Girl by Mario Vargas Llosa takes about 7 hours 5 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.

About 7 hours 5 minutes

A weekend read

First published 2006. 386 pages, about 106,150 words.

15 days at 30 minutes a day

Estimate based on 275 words per page.

At other speeds

Slow, 150 words a minute 11 hours 48 minutes
Average, 250 words a minute 7 hours 5 minutes
Fast, 400 words a minute 4 hours 25 minutes

The page count is the median across 22 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.

About the book

Ricardo Somocurcio is in love with a bad girl. He loves her as a teenager known as 'Lily' in Llama in 1950, when she arrives one summer out of the blue, claiming to be from Chile but vanishing the moment her claim is exposed as fiction. He loves her next in Paris, where she appears as the enchanting 'Comrade Arlette', an activist en route to Cuba, and becomes his lover, albeit an icy, remote one who denies knowing anything about the Lily of years gone by. Whoever the bad girl turns up as - whether it's Madame Robert Arnoux, the wife of a high-ranking UNESCO official, or Kuriko, the mistress of a sinister Japanese businessman - and however poorly she treats him, Ricardo is doomed to worship her. Gifted liar and irresistible, maddening muse - does Ricardo ever know who she really is? The answer is an unclear as what has become of Ricardo himself, a lifelong expatriate shadowed by the sense that he is only ever drifting. Mario Vargas Llosa's beguiling new novel The Bad Girl, tries to differentiate between the strange bedfellows of good and bad, proving that either can turn out not what they appear to be.

Subjects: Travelers, Women travelers, Fiction, Travelers in fiction, Women travelers in fiction, Ficción

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