Ken Follett tackles the building of Stonehenge in Circle Of Days

Trust bestselling Welsh novelist Ken Follett to breathe spectacle into a pile of stones. It was a book about the building of a mediaeval cathedral, after all, that catapulted him into the literary stratosphere.

- Cherie Lok

The 76-year-old got his start writing thrillers, but cemented his legacy with historical fiction.

The Pillars Of The Earth, published in 1989, remains his most popular book, with more than 175 million copies sold worldwide. It traces the political tumult and personal turmoil of his 12th-century characters, framed by the construction of the fictional Kingsbridge Cathedral.

Spanning 50 years and 1,104 pages, it is a veritable epic.

In comparison, Circle Of Days, the 704-page tome published in September, is “a relatively short book for me”, as he wryly puts it, speaking to The Sunday Times over a Zoom call from his residence in Stevenage, England.

For his latest foray into the past, he has gone even further back in time, to a period when words themselves vanish from the historical record. Instead, the clearest message left by these prehistoric forebears is written with stone.

Stonehenge, that iconic ring of megaliths on England's Salisbury Plain, is an anomaly even among stone circles, which have been found around the world.

“There’s much more skill and design that went into Stonehenge than in any other stone circle I've ever come across,” says Follett, citing its architectural sophistication: huge stones, carefully shaped and locked together with “peg and hole” joints.

Famous though Stonehenge may be, it remains an enigma.

“It must have been tremendously difficult to move those huge stones and to put them up like that in such a neat order. It’s astonishing. Everybody wants to know how it was done. And once I realised what the steps would be in making this monument, I could see that there was potential for a really good novel there.”