Another masterful work of historical fiction by Ken Follett, and an improvement, I think, on 'Column of Fire'. Easy enough … until the morning she looks up in the Theatre and sees strangely marked insects swarming a severed hand in the rafters.

The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network. And while there is definitely a limit to how far Follet could go on existing scholarship before taking up some creative liberties, nevertheless at times it definitely felt like I had taken a time machine to early medieval England. The Evening and the Morning is the fourth novel in Ken Follett's sweeping Kingsbridge series set in medieval Britain, a series which started life thirty years ago with the bestselling The Pillars of the Earth.A lowly monk, Aldred, has hopes to make the impoverished, humble abbey the centre of scholarship and education throughout Europe. As it stands, the Vikings and their ilk are a nebulous threat, ever at the perimeter of our characters' concerns, but not directly in the flow of the narrative after the first chapter. Ragna builds a reputation as a just and capable noblewoman and landlord and has three young sons with Wilwulf.

Probably this is a detail that will concern very few readers, but it was an odd missed opportunity to me. But while 'Pillars' has the White Ship mystery and 'World' has the subterfuge of Edward II, 'Evening' has no such deep-seated historical scandal at its heart. This book is the prequel to The Pillars of the Earth (which happens to be in my top 10 favorite books of all time). But he believes it’s wrong to be gay, so he turns all his energies into his great project, which is to build a centre of learning and scholarship in his abbey.Yes, reading this book assures me they have, even though money still has the same greedy power it always has. This tiny village has an alehouse, a small minster, and a nunnery on a nearby island where nuns care for lepers.

I felt like CofF spun off in an entirely new direction, focusing on the wider political and religious struggles of the world and often forgetting Kingsbridge and its citizens. Literatura de evasión de calidad, con un soberbio trabajo documental y unos personajes sencillos que responden a estereotipos claros y reconocibles, pero en cualquier caso entrañables. The characters, many who are filled with greed and ambition, were so well-developed I felt I knew them. I read this book on my Kindle and found it an easier read than his other novels in the series, I think this is because I could control the font size and brightness of the screen, and the Kindle is so much easier to carry about than then the actual book. And as I stayed up increasingly later in the evenings to devour chapter after chapter, Follet’s style of descriptiveness had ceased to be a bother, and instead just made the characters’ world come incredibly alive through rich detail.

Está-se em 997, numa época de caos, violência e espadeirada, que a História conhece como Idade das Trevas — um nome que, diga-se de passagem, lhe assenta que nem uma luva! World Without End, the sequel to The Pillars of the Earth, proved equally popular when it was published in 2007.