English author Ken Follett's latest historical novel, published in 2025, transports readers approximately 2,500 years into the past to explore the lives of Neolithic people. We know remarkably little about this era, when tribes of hunters, shepherds, farmers, and miners lived side by side, trading goods, forming alliances, and sometimes clashing. Follett's ambitious work attempts to illuminate this distant world of our ancestors.
The story centers on Seft, a young miner who crafts tools including knives, axes, hide scrapers, and arrowheads alongside his father and brothers. After a violent confrontation, he leaves his family to join his beloved Nee in a shepherding tribe. The young couple first met during a religious festival at the Monument, the mysterious stone circle of Stonehenge, which serves as the novel's focal point and England's most enigmatic historical landmark.
Four times annually, neighboring tribes gather at Stonehenge for seasonal rituals. Inside the circle, priestesses perform ceremonies with remarkable acoustic properties. Their singing is audible within but barely detectable outside. The Monument functions as a solar calendar, with cult servants using clay shards to track weeks, months, and years. While these priestesses could count and name numbers, ordinary tribe members relied on their fingers and toes to tally livestock.
Festival participants feast on meat prepared by the shepherd tribe's women and spend nights with partners of their choosing to improve future offspring and avoid inbreeding. Days are devoted to trading goods. This peaceful existence is occasionally disrupted by intertribal warfare. When farmers burn down the originally wooden Monument, the priestess Joia and Seft spend years developing an audacious plan: transporting massive stones weighing twenty-five tons each, four meters high, from a valley miles away to rebuild it.
Without horses or wheels, convincing a thousand volunteers to drag stone blocks across hilly terrain seems impossible. Yet Follett's heroes succeed in moving nine enormous stones that still captivate tourists today. The nearly 670 page novel reads breathlessly, vividly depicting simple lives and multiple family destinies.
However, some aspects strain credibility. The characters speak in surprisingly sophisticated language, casually discussing concepts like reason, happiness, law, incest, community, and premonition. These are abstractions unlikely to have specific names in that era. The author also presents same-sex relationships with contemporary enthusiasm, including detailed intimate scenes that feel anachronistic in their modern treatment and acceptance.
Despite these liberties with historical authenticity, Follett delivers an engaging narrative that brings ancient Britain to life. The weathered stones of Stonehenge continue to preserve our ancestors' history, and this novel offers one compelling interpretation of how they got there.