#kingsbridge

[newyorkthegoldenage]

A country store and frame house at 2553 Sage Place, Spuyten Duyvil, Kingsbridge, the Bronx, October 11, 1935.

Photo: Berenice Abbott via MCNY/pastvu.com

[wanderingnewyork]

Kingsbridge, #the_Bronx

[madebytaylorursula]

Some of my fave designs I’ve done so far in my bookbinding journey! Always hard to just choose a few

Etsy and insta/tiktok is also @madebytaylorursula

[malewifeintraining]

seeing queer representation in the most unlikely of places

[stringtheory13]

Do you all count the prologue for the first line of a book?

I just started reading Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett, and the first line of the Prologue is “The small boys came early to the hanging” and the first line of chapter 1 is “In a broad valley, at the foot of a sloping hillside, beside a clear bubbling stream, Tom was building a house.”

And those sentences just set VERY different vibes for the book.

[artemisia-black]

I love the Kingsbridge series, partly because it makes me feel like a vampire visiting this town over the course of the centuries.

[corainne]

This is like crack to me

[beckyreviewsbooks]

The Armour of Light - Ken Follett

Love is the best thing in the world to have, and the worst to lose.” For a moment he felt terrible grief, and he had to fight back tears.

Follett ends his epic saga with this final installment in the Kingsbridge series, which explores the industrialisation of cloth manufacturing and European politics at the turn of the 18th century.

I've really enjoyed reading this series, even though I only started it to appease a colleague who recommended it and gifted me the first book! This novel in particular highlights the development of Follett's writing, and I quite enjoy that he keeps things relatively simple; what with the sheer length of his novels, and the vast research and technical detail that goes into them, I think if the prose was at all flowery it would be unreadable.

As always, the characters slowly grow on you and you find yourself rooting for the workers to triumph against greedy masters. As their stories outgrew Kingsbridge and enter Europe, I feel this novel tackled the era's politics better than the third installment which again shows the authors ability to write a well crafted story.

Interestingly, there are two queer couples in this book, including a main character - for some reason this surprised me, just as I figured Follett is a fairly old man by now and wouldn't have considered this! A welcome addition though.

And finally, what I have been measuring throughout this series - a woman's breasts were first mentioned on page 107! This beats the previous record of page 4.

Date started: 21/8/25

Date finished: 29/8/25

Pages: 735

⭐⭐⭐⭐.5/5