Janine

Definitely in the top 10.

The author.

I don't know because I didn't experience the physical book.

yes.

The addition of the podcast interview at the end was really interesting and a nice touch.

Robertson Dean took an excellent story, filled with "strange" names and far off places, and made it come alive.

The part where Queen Manduhai falls off her horse when heavily pregnant and her warriors create a human wall and save her.

The insights into an ancient culture and ways was my favourite aspect of the book.

The part where Queen Manduhai falls off her horse when heavily pregnant and her warriors create a human wall and save her.

Well worth listening to.

Ken Follett's epic 'sequel' to Pillars of the Earth is engaging, absorbing, magnificently structured and wonderfully read by John Lee.

The downside of not being able to stop listening is that the repetition (necessary perhaps in a novel of this length) is more glaring than it might be to a reader not listening for hours and hours at a time.

Although well done and read, the cheat version of DH Lawrence's classic can never stand up to the novel as originally penned.

I read Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth when it was published in 1989 - and the epic is no less engaging the second time around. Follett has woven in all the elements of a top notch tale - good, evil, justice, injustice, ambition, greed, redemption... The addition of Follett's preface adds insights into the creation of the novel and his transition from thrillers to the much more complex structure and story of Pillars.

"Haussmann, or the Distinction" brings alive, in fabulous detail, another era, set of social codes, and behaviours. Laid over this are eternal tales of love, duty, pain and survival.

Fact or fiction or a mix of both, the characters are interesting and rounded, and a pleasure to follow.

As author Paul Lefarge says in his introduction, the questions the novel asks are as valid today as they were 100 or more years ago. "How to build new things without demolishing old ones... How to preserve the past without living in in, which are as worth asking today as they were a century ago".

Beautifully written and read.. and well worth listening to.

Interesting plot, splendid backdrop, characters with potential and the promise of moral dilemma are spoiled by unclever execution, a writing approach that tells, tells and overtells, and the apparent absence of anyone to tell Griffiths that troubled marriages and temptation are not, by themselves, new or interesting. And that if he's going to use them, a lot more time needs to be spent developing a unique approach. As it is, the novel is full of wasted opportunities... this is not one you'll want to rewind and listen to, much less savour, again.