Ken Follett’s “The Pillars of the Earth” gets a sequel

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Hollywood’s not the only place to bank on sequels. Ken Follett, who in the last decade or so has focused on writing thrillers (‘Whiteout,’ ‘The Third Twin’), is returning to the medieval past and his greatest success, ‘The Pillars of the Earth,’ the whopper-sized 1989 novel about the building of a Gothic cathedral in 12th century England.

Scheduled for a fall release, the 988-page sequel, ‘World Without End,’ will be published by Dutton Books. Dutton announced the book earlier this year, and the advance galley arrived this week in the mail along with another huge historical novel scheduled for fall publication by the Overlook Press: an unabridged version of John Cowper Powys’ Arthurian epic, ‘Porius.’

Why mention them now? Out of sheer relief. One of the challenges reviewers face is in fully appreciating a very long novel when the turnaround time between assignment and deadline is mercilessly short--something exacerbated when publishers bar early access to a hot book (the Harry Potter series, for example). Dutton certainly could’ve orchestrated some buzz over Follett’s book by keeping it out of reach until it arrived in bookstores. Powys, on the other hand, is not an easy author to warm up to: He wrote long, sometimes rambling (and spectacular) epics that required plenty of time and patience. In both cases, the early arrival of review copies seems aimed at building good word of mouth among newspaper book sections and other literary publications so that both will stay visible among the crowd of fall releases.

Nick Owchar