How long does it take to read The Narrow Road to the Deep North?
Richard Flanagan
The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan takes about 8 hours 12 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 8 hours 12 minutes
A week or two of reading
First published 2000. 447 pages, about 122,925 words.
17 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 13 hours 40 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 8 hours 12 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 5 hours 7 minutes |
The page count is the median across 23 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
The Narrow Road to the Deep North is a love story unfolding over half a century between a doctor and his uncle’s wife. Taking its title from one of the most famous books in Japanese literature, written by the great haiku poet Basho, Flanagan’s novel has as its heart one of the most infamous episodes of Japanese history, the construction of the Thailand-Burma Death Railway in World War II. In the despair of a Japanese POW camp on the Death Railway, surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his love affair with his uncle’s young wife two years earlier. Struggling to save the men under his command from starvation, from cholera, from beatings, he receives a letter that will change his life forever. Source
Subjects: Prisoners of war, Burma, History, Japanese Prisoners and prisons, Fiction, Fiction, historical
