For ever and ever

The year is 1327. Life in the English town of Kingsbridge is inextricably linked with the running of the two local monasteries, one for men and one for women, which jointly share the care of the famous Kingsbridge Cathedral. However, while the nuns, who run the local hospital, receive generous donations from grateful, recovered patients, the monks live in poverty and blind ignorance, consumed by envy and a desire to seize the property of their “rivals”. The prosperity of the ordinary people of Kingsbridge is otherwise entirely dependent on the commercial successes or failures of the wool guild. Some of them – Gwenda, the daughter of a local thief, and Philemon, the guild master’s daughter Caris, the builder Merthin, and his brother Ralph – decide to take fate firmly into their own hands and try to defy all its whims, whether for good and beneficial or selfish and opportunistic reasons. The lives of all, however, are gradually, substantially, and irrevocably intersected by the greatest disaster sent upon mankind at that time: the plague epidemic of the disease known as la moria grande, the great death.