ShelfLook
Tools About
Cover of These Violent Delights

How long does it take to read These Violent Delights?

Micah Nemerever

These Violent Delights by Micah Nemerever takes about 8 hours 48 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.

About 8 hours 48 minutes

A week or two of reading

First published 2020. 480 pages, about 132,000 words.

18 days at 30 minutes a day

Estimate based on 275 words per page.

At other speeds

Slow, 150 words a minute 14 hours 40 minutes
Average, 250 words a minute 8 hours 48 minutes
Fast, 400 words a minute 5 hours 30 minutes

The page count is the median across 6 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.

About the book

The Secret History meets Lie with Me in Micah Nemerever's compulsively readable debut novel—a feverishly taut Hitchcockian story about two college students, each with his own troubled past, whose escalating obsession with one another leads to an act of unspeakable violence. When Paul enters university in early 1970s Pittsburgh, it’s with the hope of moving past the recent death of his father. Sensitive, insecure, and incomprehensible to his grieving family, Paul feels isolated and alone. When he meets the worldly Julian in his freshman ethics class, Paul is immediately drawn to his classmate’s effortless charm. Paul sees Julian as his sole intellectual equal—an ally against the conventional world he finds so suffocating. Paul will stop at nothing to prove himself worthy of their friendship, because with Julian life is more invigorating than Paul could ever have imagined. But as charismatic as he can choose to be, Julian is also volatile and capriciously cruel, and Paul becomes increasingly afraid that he can never live up to what Julian expects of him. As their friendship spirals into all-consuming intimacy, they each learn the lengths to which the other will go in order to stay together, their obsession ultimately hurtling them toward an act of irrevocable violence. Unfolding with a propulsive ferocity, These Violent Delights is an exquisitely plotted excavation of the depths of human desire and the darkness it can bring forth in us.

Subjects: Fiction, coming of age, Pittsburgh (pa.), fiction, Gay men, fiction, Artists, fiction, Gay men, Fiction

Books like this

Popular books of similar length