Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #259325 in Books
• Published on: 2004-03
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 912 pages

From the Publisher
The towering story of five families through 100 centuries of turmoil, tyranny, passion and prosperity.

About the Author
Edward Rutherfurd was born in Salisbury, England, and educated at Cambridge University and Stanford University in California. His first bestselling novel, Sarum, is based on the history of Salisbury and Stonehenge. Russka, his second novel, recounted the sweeping history of Russia. London tells the two-thousand-year story of the great city, bringing all of the richness of London's past unforgettably to life. His last novel, The Forest, was set in the New Forest. A former resident of London and New York City, Edward Rutherfurd has had a home in Dublin for more than ten years. He has two children.

Customer Reviews

Missing what other people found
Nice idea for a book - spoilt by turgid writing, uninspired characters and feeble plot lines.

Oh well - a lot of other people seem to like it.

epic
If you like James A Michener, Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth and similar novels set in a factual past with fictional characters, you'll like this. It makes you wonder about your own ancestry. It's a good read, a bit long but worth sticking with. Enjoyable.

A triumph....eventually!
For me, Rutherfurd's first epic novel eventually earned its 4 stars thanks to its ambition, the author's historical research and the improving quality of the writing as the book progresses, although at the 500 page mark I would have given it only 2 stars.
The book's flaws are inherent, that is to say the author has chosen to set the story in one place and over the entire span of what we would call the time of modern man, which means that characters, and to a lesser extent plots, and time itself are forced to play subsidiary roles to place. The book loosely tracks the fortunes of four or five family groupings, from pre-christian times to the present day though the area around the five valleys of modern Salisbury, remains pre-eminent. If a character leaves Sarum he usually leaves the story, although where Rutherfurd breaks this self imposed rule, for instance following characters to America and India - the story improves and the reader can empathise more.
This primacy of place for me does not work - Rutherfurd tries to maintain continuity by reference to physical characteristics, but our loyalties too often lie with a character he has just swept into the past as he hurries the story along towards the present day and the reader is sometimes left breathless and anxious, and sometimes a little concerned for the fate of a character just discarded.
Until the book reaches the middle ages, virtually all characters are superficial, and in many cases do not really speak dialogue at all, they merely hurry the plot along with wooden statements in the style of facing the audience and crying "I will go west, and seek the rich hunting grounds of my Celtic brothers"..... "And I will go south to Gaul, and thence to Rome...." etc.
However, improved writing and character forming begin to transform the storytelling around the point at which the building of Salisbury Cathedral commences in the chronicle. Maybe this is no coincidence as Rutherfurd is clearly motivated by the cathedral as his epilogue testifies, and among all the journeys in this novel, not least is his own improving craft and confidence as a writer. By the time the English Civil War is reached characters feel more rounded and convincing, and even conversing!
Praise is due to Rutherfurd both for the historical research that has gone into this book and the way in which he uses it to inform the plots and scenes of the story without overloading us with unnecessary information - always a temptation when a writer seeks payback for all the hours spent in research.
Ultimately this is a flawed epic, but a magnificently ambitious endeavour.