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How long does it take to read The Sense of an Ending?

Julian Barnes

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes takes about 2 hours 49 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.

About 2 hours 49 minutes

An evening's read

First published 2011. 154 pages, about 42,350 words.

6 days at 30 minutes a day

Estimate based on 275 words per page.

At other speeds

Slow, 150 words a minute 4 hours 42 minutes
Average, 250 words a minute 2 hours 49 minutes
Fast, 400 words a minute 1 hour 46 minutes

The page count is the median across 10 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.

About the book

By an acclaimed writer at the height of his powers, The Sense of an Ending extends a streak of extraordinary books that began with the best-selling Arthur & George and continued with Nothing to Be Frightened Of and, most recently, Pulse. This intense new novel follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he has never much thought about—until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance, one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. Tony Webster thought he’d left all this behind as he built a life for himself, and by now his marriage and family and career have fallen into an amicable divorce and retirement. But he is then presented with a mysterious legacy that obliges him to reconsider a variety of things he thought he’d understood all along, and to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world. A novel so compelling that it begs to be read in a single sitting, with stunning psychological and emotional depth and sophistication, The Sense of an Ending is a brilliant new chapter in Julian Barnes’s oeuvre.

Subjects: Middle-aged men, Life change events, Male friendship, Fiction, Middle aged men, Friendship

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