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Cover of Tulip Fever

How long does it take to read Tulip Fever?

Deborah Moggach

Tulip Fever by Deborah Moggach takes about 5 hours 9 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.

About 5 hours 9 minutes

A weekend read

First published 1999. 281 pages, about 77,275 words.

11 days at 30 minutes a day

Estimate based on 275 words per page.

At other speeds

Slow, 150 words a minute 8 hours 35 minutes
Average, 250 words a minute 5 hours 9 minutes
Fast, 400 words a minute 3 hours 13 minutes

The page count is the median across 5 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.

About the book

A tale of art, beauty, lust, greed, deception and retribution -- set in a refined society ablaze with tulip fever. In 1630s Amsterdam, tulipomania has seized the populace. Everywhere men are seduced by the fantastic exotic flower. But for wealthy merchant Cornelis Sandvoort, it is his young and beautiful wife, Sophia, who stirs his soul. She is the prize he desires, the woman he hopes will bring him the joy that not even his considerable fortune can buy. Cornelis yearns for an heir, but so far he and Sophia have failed to produce one. In a bid for immortality, he commissions a portrait of them both by the talented young painter Jan van Loos. But as Van Loos begins to capture Sophia's likeness on canvas, a slow passion begins to burn between the beautiful young wife and the talented artist. As the portrait unfolds, so a slow dance is begun among the household's inhabitants. Ambitions, desires, and dreams breed a grand deception--and as the lies multiply, events move toward a thrilling and tragic climax. In this richly imagined international bestseller, Deborah Moggach has created the rarest of novels--a lush, lyrical work of fiction that is also compulsively readable. Seldom has a novel so vividly evoked a time, a place, and a passion.

Subjects: Netherlands, Fiction, History, Women, Portrait painters, Fiction, romance, historical, general

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