How long does it take to read The Constant Gardener?
The Constant Gardener by John le Carré takes about 10 hours 13 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 10 hours 13 minutes
A week or two of reading
First published 2000. 557 pages, about 153,175 words.
21 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 17 hours 1 minute |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 10 hours 13 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 6 hours 23 minutes |
The page count is the median across 56 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Frightening, heartbreaking, and exquisitely calibrated, John le Carré's new novel opens with the gruesome murder of the young and beautiful Tessa Quayle near northern Kenya's Lake Turkana, the birthplace of mankind. Her putative African lover and traveling companion, a doctor with one of the aid agencies, has vanished from the scene of the crime. Tessa's much older husband, Justin, a career diplomat at the British High Commission in Nairobi, sets out on a personal odyssey in pursuit of the killers and their motive. The plot was vaguely based on a real-life case in Kano, Nigeria. A master chronicler of the deceptions and betrayals of ordinary people caught in political conflict, le Carré portrays, in The Constant Gardener, the dark side of unbridled capitalism. His eighteenth novel is also the profoundly moving story of a man whom tragedy elevates. Justin Quayle, amateur gardener and ineffectual bureaucrat, seemingly oblivious to his wife's cause, discovers his own resources and the extraordinary courage of the woman he barely had time to love. The Constant Gardener is a magnificent exploration of the new world order by one of the most compelling and elegant storytellers of our time.
Subjects: John le Carré, British, Fiction, Novel, Corrupt practices, Corporations
