Sarum

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The fictional characters of the book’s first half, drew me in much more than those of the latter half.

Sarum (novel) - Wikipedia

Due to its originality, the reader roots for Sarum, and that is what propelled me to finish it, and to have been happy in so doing. Rutherfurd's style, his dialogue, his characters, make the story unfold much a whipped cream pouring from a bowl - smooth, tasty, delicious. A first novel, Rutherfurd's sweeping saga of the area surrounding Stonehenge and Salisbury, England, covers 10,000 years and includes many generations of five families. This work ultimately doubled the cathedral's length and involved the large-scale leveling of the ecclesiastical district in the northwest quadrant of the town.Many of the ornaments and ceremonial practices associated with the Sarum rite—though not the full liturgy itself—were revived in the Anglican Communion in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as part of the Anglo-Catholic Oxford Movement in the Church of England. The revisions during Osmund's episcopate resulted in the compilation of a new missal, breviary, and other liturgical manuals, which came to be used throughout southern England, Wales, and parts of Ireland. The addition of 'old' to the name distinguished it from New Sarum, the formal name of the present-day city of Salisbury until 2009. Chapters begin with a lot of historical exposition explaining what's going on in this era, then zooming into what our families are up to and which side they're taking.

Sarum by Edward Rutherfurd | Waterstones

Old Sarum, in Wiltshire, South West England, is the ruined and deserted site of the earliest settlement of Salisbury.But even if that were the intention of the author, the personal intrigues of the characters themselves need not have been sacrificed as much, nor did the detail of the historical/political landscape have to be twice as meticulous in the latter chapters than it was in the earlier chapters. At the end of the book, though no one could claim having become an expert in the history of the locale, one cannot help but feel that they know it a little more or a little better than they had. The story of the small portion of humanity that settled in and developed Salisbury (“Sarum”: being an abbreviated rendering of the Roman name Sorbiodunum) from the stone age to the 1980s.