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How long does it take to read While I Was Gone?

Sue Miller

While I Was Gone by Sue Miller takes about 5 hours 17 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.

About 5 hours 17 minutes

A weekend read

First published 1999. 288 pages, about 79,200 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 48 minutes
Average, 250 words a minute 5 hours 17 minutes
Fast, 400 words a minute 3 hours 18 minutes

The page count is the median across 9 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.

About the book

In the summer of 1968, Jo Becker ran out on the marriage and the life her parents wanted for her, and escaped - for one beautiful, idyllic year - into a life that was bohemian and romantic, living under an assumed name in a rambling group house in Cambridge. It was a time of limitless possibility, but it ended in a single instant when Jo returned home one night to find her best friend lying dead in a pool of blood on the living room floor. Now Jo has everything she's ever wanted: a veterinary practice she loves, a devoted husband, three grown daughters, a beautiful Massachusetts farmhouse. And if occasionally she feels a stranger to herself and wonders what happened to the freedom she once felt, or how she came to be the wife, mother, and doctor her neighbors know and trust - if at times she feels as if her whole life is vanishing behind her as she's living it - she need only look at her daughters or her husband, Daniel, to recall the satisfactions of family and community and marriage. But when an old housemate settles in her small town, the fabric of Jo's life begins to unravel: seduced again by the enticing possibility of another self and another life, she begins a dangerous flirtation that returns her to the darkest moment of her past and imperils all she loves.

Subjects: Married women, Women veterinarians, Fiction, Domestic relations, Murder, Marriage

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