How long does it take to read Theory of Flight?
Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu
Theory of Flight by Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu takes about 5 hours 55 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 5 hours 55 minutes
A weekend read
First published 2018. 323 pages, about 88,825 words.
12 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 9 hours 52 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 5 hours 55 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 3 hours 42 minutes |
The page count is the median across 2 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
As Imogen Zula Nyoni, aka Genie, lies in a coma in hospital after a long illness, her family and friends struggle to come to terms with her impending death. Genie has gifts that transcend time and space, and this is her story. It is also the story of her forebears - Baines Tikiti, who, because of his wanderlust, changed his name and ended up walking into the Indian Ocean; his son, Livingstone Stanley Tikiti, who, during the war, took as his nom de guerre Golide Gumede and who became obsessed with flight; and Golide's wife, Elizabeth Nyoni, a country-and-western singer self-styled after Dolly Parton, blonde wig and all. With the lightest of touches, and with an overlay of magical-realist beauty, this novel sketches, through the lives of a few families and the fate of a single patch of ground, decades of national history - from colonial occupation to the freedom struggle, to the devastation wrought by the sojas, the hi virus, and The Man Himself. By turns mysterious and magical, but always honest, The Theory of Flight dwells not on what was lost and what went wrong in a nation's history, but on the personal triumphs and why they matter.
Subjects: Fiction, historical, Fiction, general
