Book info

• Title World Without End
• Author Ken Follett
• Year 2007
• Genre Historical

On the day after Halloween, in the year 1327, four children slip away from the cathedral city of Kingsbridge. They are a thief, a bully, a boy genius and a girl who wants to be a doctor. In the forest they see two men killed. As adults, their lives will be braided together by ambition, love, greed and revenge. They will see prosperity and famine, plague and war. One boy will travel the world but come home in the end; the other will be a powerful, corrupt nobleman. One girl will defy the might of the medieval church; the other will pursue an impossible love. And always they will live under the long shadow of the unexplained killing they witnessed on that fateful childhood day.

Thoughts

As a big fan of The Pillars of the Earth, I couldn’t quite work out how there could be a sequel. How can you follow something quite so epic and sprawling and do it successfully? Well, I needn’t have pondered. I loved World Without End, perhaps even more than the original. Despite its length, it was an absolute page-turner, I was hooked and read it at every opportunity.

It is a sequel only in so much as it takes place in the same location. You don’t need to have read the original to get into this one, and there are only brief nods to the characters of the first book - with a few of our main protagonists distantly related. Instead, we are introduced to a new cast and we get to follow them through a good proportion of the lives. Highs and lows, triumphs, tragedies, the book is all-encompassing. There are surprises around every corner, and just when you think something is settled, it is turned on its head. Everything is covered, from the small day-to-day lives of these characters, to the larger things they have to deal with, like the plague!

If I have just one complaint, it is that the long-running will they, won’t they relationship took just a couple of turns too many for my liking. Actually, not even that, it’s just he swore it was the last time he would ask her to marry her at least twice, maybe even three times, and still kept coming back for more. But that’s love, isn’t it? Regardless, this is a top notch book and if it wasn’t so long, I’d have gone back to the beginning and read it all over again.

Revisited - Dec 23

I’m planning to read some more of the Kingsbridge series so took the opportunity to refresh myself of both Pillars and this one. That’s no easy feat as they are such long books. It’s interesting that I originally thought this one was even better. On this re-reading round, I felt like the first book was better. I suppose this one has less focus on architecture, although that is in there, and is instead more about the highs and lows of a lifetime for four friends. It’ll be very interesting to see how the next one holds up.

Rating: 5 / 5