How long does it take to read The Satanic Verses?
The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie takes about 10 hours 16 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 10 hours 16 minutes
A week or two of reading
First published 1988. 560 pages, about 154,000 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 7 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 10 hours 16 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 6 hours 25 minutes |
The page count is the median across 61 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
The Satanic Verses is Salman Rushdie's fourth novel, first published September 26, 1988 and inspired in part by the life of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. As with his previous books, Rushdie used magical realism and relied on contemporary events and people to create his characters. The title refers to the satanic verses, a group of Quranic verses that refer to three pagan Meccan goddesses: Allāt, Uzza, and Manāt. The part of the story that deals with the "satanic verses" was based on accounts from the historians al-Waqidi and al-Tabari. In the United Kingdom, The Satanic Verses received positive reviews, was a 1988 Booker Prize finalist (losing to Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda) and won the 1988 Whitbread Award for novel of the year.
Subjects: General & Literary Fiction, East Indians, Didactic fiction, literary fiction, families, Islam
