Cassie McCullough

See you then.

And I'm Cassie McCullough.

And we're here today with books that'll take us into the past, into an alternative reality, and then to Paris with The Mega Rich.

And a man lives in a mysterious labyrinth filled with statues and seawater.

In Susanna Clarke's novel Piranesi and fantasy author C.S.

Pacat will help us tread that particular maze.

Well, can I just start by saying that Ken Follett has sold more than 160 million books in his life.

So even if he just had $1 for every one of those books, he's a very wealthy guy.

He has written 20 standalone novels as well as a couple of other series, but it's the pillars of the earth that shot him to fame.

It's...

Well, gosh, it's a sprawling novel.

Anyone who's read it will tell you that just the act of reading it gave them RSI.

And then he followed it up with three more equally thunderingly sized books.

This is a prequel.

But I guess, you know, what you need to know about the story is that it's, well, gosh, there's so many people in it.

There's so many different timeframes.

But essentially you're following a range of characters in each book and there's always a very poor guy there.

There's always a very clever woman.

There are earls and sheriffs and monks and abbots and then royalty and aristocracy who are genuinely less than sympathetic to the poor.

And each of these novels do bear a lot of similarity to each other.