Follett, Ken - The evening and the morning

"The evening and the morning" is a novel which was written by Ken Follett and which was published in 2020.
This book is the prologue to Follett's trilogy devoted to the fictional village of Kingsbridge and its community. In this novel, the story goes back a century and a half, compared to the narration of that first book and makes us understand how Kingsbridge was born and how people lived in early medieval England.

In this period, England has not yet risen from the degradation it had slipped into with the end of the Roman Empire: life is a continuous struggle against hunger and Viking raids or Welsh and British raids. The protagonist is Edgar, the youngest son of a skilled boat builder in the seaside town of Combe. The boy, just eighteen, would like to have a life elsewhere with his beloved Sunni, the battered wife of the milkman Cyneric, whom he loves dearly. But the night in which the two would like to escape is marred by a Viking assault. Sunni dies at the hands of a raider and Edgar's father also falls under the blows of the raiders. Now that the shipyard is destroyed, Edgar and his family, who are also deprived of their homes, fear they will face a desperate future, perhaps even of slavery.
To escape this fate, the mother, a woman of great rationality and pragmatism, forces the three children to accept the proposal of the devious and corrupt bishop of Shiring, Wynstan: to become farmers and move to the miserable village of Dreng’s Ferry.
With this novel, Follett successfully reconstructs a historical period and, moreover, takes us back to an era made of changes and transformations that makes us reflect on that constant of a world that changes at the expense of that world that others do not want to change.