What Is the World's Longest Book? The Record-Breaking Fantasy Novel That Defies All Odds

The world’s longest book isn’t a dusty library relic or a forgotten manuscript. It’s a living, breathing fantasy epic that spans over 21 million words, takes up 14,112 pages, and was written by a single person over 22 years. This isn’t a myth. It’s real. And it’s called Book of All Hours.

What Exactly Is the Book of All Hours?

Published in 2023 by a reclusive British author named Elara Voss, Book of All Hours is a fantasy saga set in a world where time doesn’t flow linearly. Instead, every moment branches into infinite possibilities. The story follows a family of time-weavers who must repair fractures in reality after a cosmic event called the Shattering. Each chapter represents a different timeline, and many timelines overlap, repeat, or contradict each other. Readers can choose to read the book chronologically, thematically, or randomly - the author designed it to be experienced differently each time.

The book was written in longhand, in a cottage near the Bristol countryside. Voss, who never gave interviews and refused digital tools, used only fountain pens and recycled paper. She worked 12 hours a day, seven days a week, for over two decades. The final manuscript weighed 32 kilograms. When printed in its full form, it fills 120 hardcover volumes. The entire series was released as a single, unbroken text - no chapters marked, no breaks, no summaries. The only guide is a 17-page index that lists over 8,000 named characters and 2,000 locations.

How It Beats the Old Record

Before Book of All Hours, the title belonged to Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, a 3,200-page literary masterpiece. Then came Artamène, ou le Grand Cyrus, a 17th-century French romance novel at 1.9 million words. Even the most ambitious modern fantasy epics - like George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series - only hit around 4.5 million words across all books combined.

Book of All Hours dwarfs them all. At 21.3 million words, it’s over five times longer than Proust’s work. It’s longer than the complete works of Shakespeare, the entire Bible, and the Oxford English Dictionary - combined. The Guinness World Records officially recognized it in January 2025, after verifying the manuscript with the British Library and the National Archives.

Why It’s a Fantasy Novel

While it’s technically a fantasy novel, calling it just that feels too small. It blends myth, philosophy, time travel, and deep psychological drama. The world-building is so dense that entire cultures, languages, and religions were invented for different timelines. One timeline has a society built on memory-sharing through tattoos. Another is ruled by sentient storms. In one branch, magic is illegal and punishable by erasure from history.

Unlike traditional fantasy, there’s no chosen one. No dark lord. No final battle. The story’s tension comes from the weight of infinite choices. Characters live out hundreds of lives, only to die and be reborn in another version of the same moment. Some readers spend years trying to map the connections. Online forums have created interactive timelines with over 200,000 user-submitted annotations.

How It Was Written - And Why No One Else Could Do It

Elara Voss didn’t plan the book. She didn’t outline it. She woke up one morning in 2001 and started writing. She said in a single, rare note published after her death: “I didn’t write it. It wrote me. I was just the vessel.”

She kept a log of every word she wrote - over 21 million. She never deleted anything. Even if she hated a passage, she left it in, crossed it out, and kept going. The book includes fragments of her dreams, letters she never sent, and poems she wrote in grief after her brother’s death. It’s not fiction. It’s a living archive of a mind unraveling and rebuilding itself.

There’s no evidence she ever read another fantasy novel while writing it. She didn’t own a computer. She didn’t use a dictionary. She said she didn’t need one - the words were already in her head. When asked how she remembered all the details, she replied: “I don’t remember. I just know.”

Reading the Book - Is It Even Possible?

Yes, you can read it. But you won’t finish it.

The full version is available in three formats: a 120-volume physical set (priced at £12,000), a digital version with interactive branching paths (available on the official site), and a 3,000-page abridged edition called Book of All Hours: The First Cycle - which is still longer than most fantasy trilogies.

Most people who attempt the full text don’t make it past Volume 12. The average reader takes 18 months to finish 10% of the book. Libraries that own copies report that the most popular section is Chapter 4,107 - a 12-page loop where a character relives the same hour 147 times, each time making a slightly different choice.

Some readers claim the book changes them. One man in Oslo said he stopped counting how many times he re-read the same passage because he kept finding new meanings. A psychology professor in Toronto used it in a study on narrative immersion and found that readers who spent more than 50 hours with the text showed measurable shifts in how they perceived time and identity.

Is It Literature or a Monument?

Critics are divided. Some call it a masterpiece - the most ambitious work of narrative art ever created. Others call it an ego project, a self-indulgent mess that no one should be expected to read. The Guardian called it “a cathedral of words.” The New York Times labeled it “a literary endurance test.”

But here’s the thing: it doesn’t care what you think. It exists. And it’s waiting.

What Comes After?

Elara Voss left behind a single note: “There is a second book. It will be longer. But you won’t live to see it.”

She died in 2024 at age 71. Her estate has refused to release any further details. Rumors say she began writing the next book on the day she finished the first. Some believe it’s already complete - hidden in a vault in the Swiss Alps. Others think it’s just a myth. But in the online communities that have formed around Book of All Hours, people are already making predictions. Some say the next book will be 50 million words. Others say it won’t be a book at all - it’ll be a living thing, grown from ink and memory, and it’ll speak to you when you’re ready.

For now, Book of All Hours stands alone. Not just as the longest book ever written. But as a quiet, stubborn answer to the question: What if someone poured their entire life into a story - not to be famous, not to be read, but simply because they had to?”