Waiting here for everyman (Jackson Browne)

I have a little time on my hands at the moment, being in between jobs, and the time seemed right to embark on another Edward Rutherfurd epic.

I've had a copy of Sarum on the bookshelf for ages, ever since I finished London.

He writes beasts - Sarum is well over 1,300 pages, and if I don't read it quickly I will get really lost with all the characters and plots. So - knowing I'd have time to keep at it I reclaimed it from the storage box in the shed and settled in for the long haul.

Sarum is set in the area around Salisbury - hence the picture of Stonehenge on the cover.

Sarum (in the blurb) is a 'saga sweeping across millennia of settlement'.

Hwll the hunter, fleeing the rising seas at the end of the last Ice Age, finds refuge on Sarum's high ground. Nooma the stone mason builds Stonehenge for the astronomer priests and witnesses a human sacrifice; thirty-two centuries (yes - CENTURIES) later, his descendant Oswald Mason builds Salisbury cathedral with its soaring spire, and falls into each of the seven deadly sins. Roman roads, the Celtic hillfort of Old Sarum, a Saxon convent, a Norman castle, a medieval market town, a Tudor country house, Georgian townhouses, Victorian cottages - all appear and live on in perpetuity in Sarum's echoing landscape.

Saga is right.
So far, so good. I've just passed the 800 page mark and we're up to the Black Death days of the late 14th century. Pretty grim, as Karl Pilkington would say.

Love and peace - Wozza