Book Notices | A Column of Fire by Ken Follett

Ken Follett, A Column of Fire

Amazon   A Column of Fire is the third installment in Ken Follett's Kingsbridge series.* Like its predecessors, it's a big, sprawling read, centered loosely around the fictional English town of Kingsbridge. This novel picks up the story of the city's inhabitants hundreds of years after the events of Follett's World Without End. We're now in the 16th and early 17th centuries, when Europe is riven by religious conflict between Catholics and Protestants. The main protagonist, Kingsbridge native Ned Willard, spends his life in the service of Queen Elizabeth helping to root out extremist plots, all the while hoping for a world free of religious division. He's a good guy who's thwarted throughout his life by, among others, the brother of his (Catholic) childhood sweetheart. If you're familiar with the author's books, you won't be surprised by anything here—the huge cast of characters and clearly delineated good guys and bad guys; the stories of characters it's hard not to root for or against woven around real historical events; and, always, the sheer readability of it all, even at 900-plus pages. *A prequel to the series published in 2020—The Evening and the Morning—complicates things: A Column of Fire was the third book published (in 2017) in the original trilogy of Kingsbridge books, which includes Pillars of the Earth (1989) and World Without End (2007).