How long does it take to read Unless?
Unless by Carol Shields takes about 5 hours 20 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 5 hours 20 minutes
A weekend read
First published 2002. 291 pages, about 80,025 words. Written for young adults.
11 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 8 hours 54 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 5 hours 20 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 3 hours 20 minutes |
The page count is the median across 43 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Reta Winters has many reasons to be happy. Then in the spring of her forty-fourth year, all the quiet satisfactions of her well-lived life disappear in a moment: her eldest daughter Norah suddenly runs from the family and ends up mute and begging on a Toronto street corner with a hand-lettered sign reading GOODNESS around her neck. Piercing and sad, astute and evocative, full of tenderness and laughter, Unless will stand with The Stone Diaries in the canon of Carol Shields’s fiction.
Subjects: literary fiction, goodness, Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize winner, Psychological fiction, Teenage girls, Mothers and daughters
