WRITING: A REVIEW

“WORLD WITHOUT END”

By Ken Follett

World Without End is the second part of the best seller The Pillars of the Earth, by the
British novelist, Ken Follett. It is an historical fiction novel set in the Middle Ages and
takes place in the same fictional city that its antecessor novel .

In the plot, the author includes two important events in that moment: the Black Death
and the Hundred Years´ war.

The main characters are the descendants of some Pillar´s characters but about 150
years after.

The novel begins in the Kingsbridge city, England, in the XIV century, where all events
succeed around four children while they are growing up. They are Merthin -a boy
genius-, Gwenda -a thief-, Merthin´s brother Ralph -a bully-, and Caris -a girl who
wants to be a doctor-. As adults, their lives will be interlaced and always they will live
with a secret of one unexplained killing they watched on a fateful day when they were
child.

The Kingsbridge´s Cathedral, as the same that in Pillars of the Earth, is the centre of
the action, where Merthin became the main builder later than to learn with the best
builders of Florencia and rebuild one of the towers after a collapse.

The other centre of the action is a new building in the city, the Benedictines monk and
nuns Monastery´s Hospital, is where Caris get to be Prioress at the Hospital, with an
enormous influence in the city and independence to a Middle Ages´ woman.

The huge strength of this novel is the intriguing about the happen as expected and
the relations between the character´s lives. There are killers, soldiers, fights, sex,
builders, high social and religious aristocracy and plebeian people mixing in a
fascinating and impossible love story between Merthin and Caris and the struggle for
survival at that moment of History while the Black Death destroys Europe and kills the
population in all the countries.

The weakness of the book is how long it is! It has 1024 pages exactly, so when you
start to read, you know you will be reading for a long time. Not only the book is a
gripping and fascinating novel and for all lovers of historical novels, join to the Pillar of
the Earth, these are the best.