I just read and shook my head and felt thankful that I live today, and not in a time when smearing an open wound with manure to “draw out the puss” was thought to be an effective treatment. I enjoyed reading about “health care” in the 14th century, weird as that sounds. This book focused quite a bit on one character, Caris, who becomes something of a healer. The brutality is still present in this second book, but Follett chose to set the scene and then fade to black rather than making us read on in horror. I almost had to put Pillars down because it got so violent, and I don’t think of myself as being particularly squeamish about that kind of thing. One thing I did like better in World is that the violence has been toned down a lot. I will say that there’s no equivalent to Prior Philip in this book, and I missed him. I feel like I could seriously make a list of characters from each book and match most of them to their equivalents in the other. Most of the main characters felt like the same people from Pillars with their names changed. As it is, I did honestly enjoy it, but coming only a year after reading Pillars, the stories and characters were too similar for me to feel like rating it higher. Had I read this on its own, or even after the 20 years between the publication of Pillars and World, I would probably have enjoyed it more. I don’t want to say too much about the twists and turns the plot follows, so I’ll just say that the book is the story of a generation of townspeople and what life in the mid-14th century might have been like.

Set a couple of hundred years after The Pillars of the Earth, World Without End picks up the story of the town of Kingsbridge.

A world without end book