The Evening and the Morning: The Prequel to The Pillars of the Earth, A Kingsbridge Novel

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King Ethelred, shown many years into his reign, does not have the level of control over England that later kings would have. The perspective of a Danish character somewhere in the mix would've been interesting, in such a tumultuous time. The growth and transformation of a crude, small village to the thriving town of Knightsbridge, England, the setting of Pillars of Earth, is described through the hard work, tribulations, joys, and sorrows of three main characters. At first, it gave the book a bit of an over-explanatory kind of tone, and I quickly found myself wondering just how long it was going to take to eventually work my way through the several hundred pages. It's set mainly in England, with the threats of Vikings in the East and the Welsh in the West, but there are sections in Normandy, France.

While she assumes that she will be able to rule alongside her husband, nothing could be further from the truth. While there is a great deal of backstory, the essence of the story brings out some masterful character development, first as independent characters, but slowly inching each together until the final chapter, as fans of Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth can see a recognisable location. Whether this is your first foray into the Kingsbridge series or you're a diehard fan, then you won't be disappointed. It is a prequel to The Pillars of the Earth and is set around the year 1,000, when Kingsbridge was an Anglo-Saxon settlement threatened by Viking invaders.He is also active in many Stevenage charities and is President of the Stevenage Community Trust and Patron of Home-Start Hertfordshire. The Pillars of the Earth was followed by two sequels, World Without End (my favourite because it incorporated the bubonic plague of the fourteen century) and A Column of Fire (which I own, but haven't yet read, set in the sixteenth century).

Good god, when will I no longer read that ridiculous scene where a female virgin feels a resistance, a sharp pain, then BAM! According to Follett, the majority of slaves in England during this era were Britons, people pressed into bondage “from the wild western fringes of civilization, Wales and Cornwall and Ireland. This leaves room for guesswork and disagreement, more so than with the preceding period of the Roman Empire or the subsequent Middle Ages. There is a bit of everything, and I find myself constantly switching my mind on what could happen because the author just shocks us with how evil some characters can be. I liked The Evening and the Morning more than A Column of Fire, but still quite a lot less than the previous two books.

Born on June 5th, 1949 in Cardiff, Wales, the son of a tax inspector, Ken was educated at state schools and went on to graduate from University College, London, with an Honours degree in Philosophy – later to be made a Fellow of the College in 1995. In a broad scope, those things don't change much over time: we yearn for power, wealth, love, vengeance, harmony. I really enjoyed the first half of the story, but the things that I found tiresome really ended up spoiling the second half.