World Without End is a 2007 historical thriller by Ken Follett and the sequel to 1989’s The Pillars of the Earth. However, it doesn’t matter whichever you read first.

World Without End takes place in the same fictional town as Pillars of the Earth - Kingsbridge - and features the descendants of some of Pillars characters two centuries later in England in the fourteenth century. This new supersized story inspires the same question posed by its doorstop predecessor: Too fat to pick up, or too engrossing to put down?

The book evolves around 4 main characters; their lives 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.

Along the way Follett has his many characters work out the mechanics of medieval bridge building, wool dyeing, market trading, medicinal bleeding and tax levying which becomes the crux of the story and the focus for the lives of all the characters.

The Harry Potter series, Lord of the Rings are all fictional, magical stories which do transport you to another world; but this book recreates, quite vividly, the entire life of the village and the people who live there. You feel you know the place and the people as intimately as if you yourself were living there. It is well-researched, beautifully detailed portrait of the late Middle Ages. Society at every level is here, mingling in an altogether convincing way. Follett shows the workings of politicians in all their corrupt glory, in both religious and temporal spheres.

It will take you a chunk of time to read it - but it’s well worth turning off the TV for a few nights and getting out those reading glasses instead.

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