Preface to the 25th anniversary edition of The Pillars of the Earth

It's twenty-five years since I typed ‘The End' on the last page of The Pillars of the Earth. The book was published in 1989, and has sold nineteen million copies so far in thirty languages. It still seems a miracle to me that readers are so fascinated and moved by a story about building a cathedral in the Middle Ages, a surprising subject for a popular novel.