World Without End

World Without End is a historical novel by the Welsh writer Ken Follett, published in 2007. It is the second book of the Kingsbridge series and the sequel to The Pillars of the Earth, set in the same town about 157 years later.

The novel opens in 1327 with four children in the woods near Kingsbridge, where they watch a knight kill two of the queen's soldiers and hide a document, and the consequences of that morning run through the following decades. Among them are a girl who becomes a wool merchant, a boy who wants to be a builder, and a woman who trains as a physician and finds the practice of medicine closed to her. Follett puts two large historical events at the centre of the plot, the Black Death and the beginning of a war with France, and shows how the town's prosperity, the cathedral priory and the ambitions of the prior keep colliding across the period.

The Kingsbridge novels stand alone but share the town and the cathedral, and Follett returns to it again in A Column of Fire, which continues the story into the reign of Elizabeth I.