How long does it take to read The Line of Beauty?
The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst takes about 9 hours 11 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 9 hours 11 minutes
A week or two of reading
First published 2004. 501 pages, about 137,775 words.
19 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 15 hours 19 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 9 hours 11 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 5 hours 44 minutes |
The page count is the median across 19 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
It is the summer of 1983, and twenty-year-old Nick Guest has moved into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: conservative Member of Parliament Gerald, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their two children, Toby--whom Nick had idolized at Oxford--and Catherine, highly critical of her family's assumptions and ambitions, who becomes both a friend to Nick and his uneasy responsibility. As the boom years of the mid-eighties unfold, Nick, an innocent in matters of politics and money, becomes caught up in the Feddens' world--its grand parties, its surprising alliances, its parade of monsters both comic and menacing. In an era of endless possibility, he finds himself able to pursue his own private obsession with beauty--a prize as compelling to him as power and riches to his friends. An affair with a young black clerk gives him his first experience of romance, but it is a later affair with a beautiful millionaire that will change his life drastically and bring into question the larger fantasies of a ruthless decade. Framed by the two general elections that returned Margaret Thatcher to power, The Line of Beauty unfurls through four extraordinary years of change and tragedy. Richly textured, emotionally charged, disarmingly funny, this is a major work by one of our finest writers.
Subjects: LGBTQ novels, coming of age, domestic fiction, psychological fiction, fiction, Man Booker Prize Winner
