How long does it take to read The Secret Agent?
A Simple Tale
The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad takes about 4 hours 59 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 4 hours 59 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1907. 272 pages, about 74,800 words.
10 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 8 hours 19 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 4 hours 59 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 3 hours 7 minutes |
The page count is the median across 335 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Set in Soho, London, in 1886, The Secret Agent follows Adolf Verloc, who runs a modest shop selling dubious goods while secretly working as a spy for a foreign embassy. He shares his home with his wife Winnie, her elderly mother and her brother Stevie, a vulnerable young man whom Winnie tends like a son. Verloc also moves among a circle of ineffectual anarchists known to the police. When a new embassy official, Mr Vladimir, declares him unsatisfactory and demands that he provoke an outrage, Verloc must act. The novel explores anarchism, espionage, terrorism and the exploitation of the weak.
This summary was written by AI and checked by a second AI model. How these are chosen.
Subjects: Anarchists, fiction, Conspiracies, fiction, Bombings, fiction, Terrorism, fiction, Royal Greenwich Observatory, fiction, Drama
