Ken Follett's Masterpieces

A few years ago, my brother was reading a book and when he finished, he handed it to me, stating that I'd love it. We were on vacation and I started reading it immediately and couldn't put it down the rest of the trip. The book was Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth, first written in 1989; you may not have realized that the book was almost 20 years old since it's had a huge resurgence lately thanks to Oprah's book club. Part of the frenzy was driven by the fact that Follett was about to release a sequel to his popular novel. The original story follows a group of people in Kingsbridge, England and the challenges associated with building a cathedral in medieval England. I decided that in order to follow World Without End, the sequel, I should reread POTE and was honestly a bit apprehensive - would it hold up over time? Would I enjoy it as much this time around? The answer is a resounding YES! And WWE is a worthwhile successor; not a sequel in the traditional sense since it picks up about 200 years after the ends of POTE, but it is still
Kingsbridge, and the characters are the descendants of those we came to know, love, respect and in some instances, hate. While both books are hefty, the story is very engrossing, and you will come to care deeply about these characters.

If you enjoy these two, try also Ildefonso Falcones' Cathedral of the Sea, about a cathedral in Barcelona or John Shors' Beneath a Marble Sky, about building the Taj Mahal.