How long does it take to read The Wasp Factory?
The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks takes about 3 hours 33 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 3 hours 33 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1984. 194 pages, about 53,350 words. Written for young adults.
8 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 5 hours 56 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 3 hours 33 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 2 hours 13 minutes |
The page count is the median across 28 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Frank, no ordinary sixteen-year-old, lives with his father outsIde a remote Scottish village. Their life is, to say the least, unconventional. Frank's mother abandoned them years ago: his elder brother Eric is confined to a psychiatric hospital; and his father measures out his eccentricities on an imperial scale. Frank has turned to strange acts of violence to vent his frustrations. In the bizarre daily rituals there is some solace. But when news comes of Eric's escape from the hospital Frank has to prepare the ground for his brother's inevitable return - an event that explodes the mysteries of the past and changes Frank utterly. Iain Banks' celebrated first novel is a work of extraordinary originality, imagination and horrifying compulsion: horrifying, because it enters a mind whose realities are not our own, whose values of life and death are alien to our society; and compulsive, because the humour and compassion of that mind reach out to us all.
Subjects: Fathers and sons, Fiction, Serial murders, Teenage boys, Murderers, Psychopaths
