INTERVIEW WITH KEN FOLLETT
Publishers Weekly, August 2007

Why the long gap between The Pillars of the Earth and World Without End?

At the end of The Pillars of the Earth, the main characters are very old or dead, so I couldn’t write another book about the same people. I decided to write a novel set in the same town of Kingsbridge two hundred years later. I needed a theme as grand and as powerful as the building of a great cathedral, and I also came up with the Black Death, a disease that devastated Europe in the 14th century, wiping out at least one third of its population.

Yet there is no mention of the Black Death until more than 500 pages into the story...

I wanted to create well-rounded and accomplished lives for my main characters, with their ambitions, their love affairs and a history of friendships and enmities, before the Black Death appears and turns their lives upside down. The reader really needs to know the characters to truly feel the tragedy of the plague. That’s why I chose not to mention it from the start.

What do you feel is the difference between writing a suspense novel and a historical novel?

Longer novels require a much wider range of dramatic themes. When writing World Without End I used an Excel spreadsheet of the characters for the first time ever. The programme calculated their ages at each stage of the novel, so that I wouldn’t make any mistakes. I found this to be so helpful that I plan to use it for all my future books.

Have you decided on the theme of your next novel?

I have a couple of ideas, but I don’t want to talk about them just yet – sorry!