The Pillars of the Earth
In a time of civil war, famine and religious strife, there rises a magnificent Cathedral in Kingsbridge. Against this backdrop, lives entwine: Tom, the master builder, Aliena, the noblewoman, Philip, the prior of Kingsbridge, Jack, the artist in stone and Ellen, the woman from the forest who casts a curse. At once, this is a sensuous and enduring love story and an epic that shines with the fierce spirit of a passionate age.
Ken's View
This is my most popular book. It still sells about 100,000 copies a year in paperback in the US, it was number one in the UK and Italy and it was on the German best seller list for six years. It's overwhelmingly the book that readers talk to me about when I meet them in bookshops. It's becoming a cult.
When I started writing, back in the early Seventies, I found I had no vocabulary for describing buildings. I read a couple of books on architecture and developed an interest in cathedrals. I became a bit of a train spotter on the subject. I would go to a town, like Lincoln or Winchester, check into a hotel and spend a couple of days looking around the cathedral and learning about it. Before too long, it occurred to me to channel this enthusiasm into a novel.
When I started talking about the idea, some of my friends were quite shocked. They said, "you know, you've had a lot of success with these thrillers, are you sure you want to write about building a church?".
However, those of my friends who are writers saw immediately how the building of the church would be the spine of the story and the focus for the lives of all the characters. I knew it had to be a long book. It took at least thirty years to build a cathedral and most took longer because they would run out of money, or be attacked or invaded. So the story covers the entire lives of the main characters.
Writing Pillars of the Earth was exhausting. It is much more difficult to write one book of 400,000 words than three or four shorter books because you have to keep making up more and more stuff about the same people. Pillars of the Earth took me three years and three months and towards the end I was working Saturdays and Sundays because I thought I was never going to get it finished.
My publishers were a little nervous about such a very unlikely subject but paradoxically, it is my most popular book. It's also the book I'm most proud of. It recreates, quite vividly, the entire life of the village and the people who live there. You feel you know the place and the people as intimately as if you yourself were living there in the middle ages.
Audio and text excerpts
More…
- See a 'family tree' showing the principal characters and their relationships
- Read the introduction to the 1999 edition
- See illustrations from the 1999 edition
- Is Kingsbridge real?
- Students and reading groups. See the discussion guide to The Pillars of the Earth.
The Pillars of the Earth was chosen by Oprah Winfrey as the 60th Oprah’s Book Club selection in November 2007, and is #1 on the The New York Times trade paperback list and #8 on its mass market paperback list (9 December 2008).
Die Säulen der Erde
(the German edition of
The Pillars of the Earth) has been voted the third-most popular book in Germany by more than 250 000 readers who voted for the
ZDF TV channel's 'best books'
poll in 2006, after J R R Tolkein's
The Lord of the Rings
and the Bible. The audiobook edition has won a German Platinum Disk award for sales of more than 200,000 copies.
The Pillars of the Earth
is one of the top 100 books chosen by British readers in the BBC's 2003 'The Big Read' – the UK’s biggest-ever celebration of reading. Readers nominated their best-loved books, and their choices were announced on 17 May 2003 on BBC2.
The Pillars of the Earth is one of the '101 Books to Read Before You Die' chosen by patrons of Exclusive Books – it is 27th on the list.
Published as ...
Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett; William Morrow, New York 1989. In 1999 a special collector's edition of The Pillars of the Earth was published by Penguin Puttnam to mark the 10th anniversary of the original edition, in a large-format paperback with a new introduction by Ken Follett. Available in print, CD and audiobook formats.
Les Piliers de la Terre in French by Robert Laffont
Die Saulen der Erde in German by Lübbe
I Pilastri della Terra in Italian by Mondadori
Los pilares de la Tierra in Spanish by Random House Mondadori
