diff --git a/src/calibre/utils/icu.c b/src/calibre/utils/icu.c
index 7d1e9871c9..77ebb53c23 100644
--- a/src/calibre/utils/icu.c
+++ b/src/calibre/utils/icu.c
@@ -975,6 +975,25 @@ icu_break_iterator_locales(PyObject *self, PyObject *args) {
     return ret;
 } // }}}
 
+// string_length {{{
+static PyObject *
+icu_string_length(PyObject *self, PyObject *args) {
+#if PY_VERSION_HEX >= 0x03030000 
+#error Not implemented for python >= 3.3
+#endif
+
+    int32_t sz = 0;
+    UChar *icu = NULL;
+    PyObject *src = NULL;
+  
+    if (!PyArg_ParseTuple(args, "O", &src)) return NULL;
+    icu = python_to_icu(src, &sz, 1);
+    if (icu == NULL) return NULL;
+    sz = u_countChar32(icu, sz);
+    free(icu);
+    return Py_BuildValue("i", sz);
+} // }}}
+
 // Module initialization {{{
 static PyMethodDef icu_methods[] = {
     {"change_case", icu_change_case, METH_VARARGS,
@@ -1017,6 +1036,10 @@ static PyMethodDef icu_methods[] = {
      "available_locales_for_break_iterator() -> Return tuple of all available locales for the BreakIterator"
     },
 
+    {"string_length", icu_string_length, METH_VARARGS, 
+     "string_length(string) -> Return the length of a string (number of unicode code points in the string). Useful on anrrow python builds where len() returns an incorrect answer if the string contains surrogate pairs."
+    },
+
     {NULL}  /* Sentinel */
 };
 
diff --git a/src/calibre/utils/icu.py b/src/calibre/utils/icu.py
index e062f9ef00..eafd0768e0 100644
--- a/src/calibre/utils/icu.py
+++ b/src/calibre/utils/icu.py
@@ -278,6 +278,12 @@ def partition_by_first_letter(items, reverse=False, key=lambda x:x):
             ans[last_c] = [item]
     return ans
 
+# Return the number of unicode codepoints in a string
+try:
+    string_length = _icu.string_length if is_narrow_build else len
+except AttributeError:
+    string_length = len  # Somebody running from source with a binary that has not been updated
+
 ################################################################################
 
 if __name__ == '__main__':
diff --git a/src/calibre/utils/icu_test.py b/src/calibre/utils/icu_test.py
index 4bbb264d5a..2b6572c35f 100644
--- a/src/calibre/utils/icu_test.py
+++ b/src/calibre/utils/icu_test.py
@@ -132,6 +132,8 @@ class TestICU(unittest.TestCase):
         ' Test roundtripping '
         for r in (u'xxx\0\u2219\U0001f431xxx', u'\0', u'', u'simple'):
             self.ae(r, icu._icu.roundtrip(r))
+        for x, l in [('', 0), ('a', 1), ('\U0001f431', 1)]:
+            self.ae(icu._icu.string_length(x), l)
 
     def test_character_name(self):
         ' Test character naming '