I enjoyed Follett’s bestselling novel The Pillars of the Earth despite the much-criticised historical inaccuracies scattered throughout (this is usually not the case), so started this prequel with much anticipation.

The novel starts in 997, dark and turbulent times, and we meet three characters who find their lives thrown together. Edgar is a young boatbuilder whose life is upended by Vikings, forcing him and his family to move and start their lives again on a marginal farm at Dreng’s Ferry, a hamlet of little distinction. Ragna is a feisty Norman noblewoman who marries her English husband for love and against her family’s wishes and finds that her new homeland is not as cultured and advanced as she had hoped. Her husband’s family rules the local territory with an iron fist and ignores the King’s wishes with impunity. And finally, we meet Aldred, a monk of great intelligence, drive and piety, who dreams of establishing a holy centre of culture and learning. But he is working against the moral decay of the church and those who enter it for power, not faith, and he must be clever in how he survives and prospers.

Follett is a master storyteller, and I was completely engrossed in the trials and tribulations of the characters, the constant machinations of the players and the threats from Vikings, the Welsh and local outlaws. Unlike Pillars this is a more domestic novel, playing on a much smaller stage of Dreng’s Ferry and the immediate surrounds, and the descriptions of everyday life, love, business and achievement are entertaining and informative. Each character is well developed, and the reader comes to care what happens to them all, for better or for worse.

A prequel it may be, but it can certainly be read as a very fabulously entertaining stand-alone novel.

Reviewed by Lesley West