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How long does it take to read The Son?

Jo Nesbø

The Son by Jo Nesbø takes about 7 hours 21 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.

About 7 hours 21 minutes

A weekend read

First published 2014. 401 pages, about 110,275 words.

15 days at 30 minutes a day

Estimate based on 275 words per page.

At other speeds

Slow, 150 words a minute 12 hours 15 minutes
Average, 250 words a minute 7 hours 21 minutes
Fast, 400 words a minute 4 hours 36 minutes

The page count is the median across 4 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.

About the book

This novel is set amid Oslo's hierarchy of corruption, from which one very unusual young man is about to propel himself into a mission of brutal revenge. Sonny Lofthus, in his early thirties, has been in prison for the last dozen years: serving time for crimes he didn't commit. In exchange, he gets an uninterrupted supply of heroin, and the unexpected stream of fellow prisoners seeking out his uncanny abilities to soothe and absolve. His addiction started when his father committed suicide rather than be exposed as a corrupt cop, and now Sonny is the center of a vortex of corruption: prison staff, police, lawyers, a desperate priest, all of them focused on keeping him stoned and jailed, and all of them under the thumb of Oslo's crime overlord, the Twin. When Sonny learns some long-hidden truths about his father he makes a brilliant escape, and begins hunting down the people responsible for the hideous crimes he has paid for. But he is also being hunted, by the Twin, the cops, and the only person who knows the ultimate truth that Sonny is seeking. The question is, what will he do when they have cornered him?

Subjects: Police corruption, Prisoners, Revenge, False imprisonment, Fiction, Drug use

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