How long does it take to read The Bookshop?
The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald takes about 3 hours 18 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 3 hours 18 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1978. 180 pages, about 49,500 words.
7 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 5 hours 30 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 3 hours 18 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 2 hours 4 minutes |
The page count is the median across 27 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
In 1959 Florence Green, a kindhearted widow with a small inheritance, risks everything to open a bookshop - the only bookshop - in the seaside town of Hardborough. By making a success of a business so impractical, she invites the hostility of the town's less prosperous shopkeepers. By daring to enlarge her neighbors' lives, she crosses Mrs. Gamart, the local arts doyenne. Her warehouse leaks, her cellar seeps, and the shop is apparently...haunted. Only too late does she begin to suspect the truth: that a town that lacks a bookshop isn't always a town that wants one.
Subjects: Booksellers and bookselling, Bookstores, England, Fiction, Relations with women, Widows
