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How long does it take to read Warlight?

Michael Ondaatje

Warlight by Michael Ondaatje takes about 5 hours 34 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.

About 5 hours 34 minutes

A weekend read

First published 2018. 304 pages, about 83,600 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 17 minutes
Average, 250 words a minute 5 hours 34 minutes
Fast, 400 words a minute 3 hours 29 minutes

The page count is the median across 16 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.

About the book

In 1945, just after World War II, fourteen-year-old Nathaniel and his older sister Rachel stay behind in London when their parents move to Singapore, leaving them in the care of a mysterious figure named The Moth. They suspect he might be a criminal, and they grow both more convinced and less concerned as they come to know his eccentric crew of friends: men and women joined by a shared history of unspecified service during the war, all of whom seem, in some way, determined now to protect and educate (in rather unusual ways) Rachel and Nathaniel. But are they really what and who they claim to be? And what does it mean when the siblings' mother returns after months of silence without their father, explaining nothing, excusing nothing? A dozen years later, Nathaniel begins to uncover all that he didn't know and understand in that time, and it is this journey--through facts, recollection, and imagination--that he narrates.

Subjects: Fiction, coming of age, Brothers and sisters, fiction, London (england), fiction, Fiction, historical, Abandoned children, Brothers and sisters

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