This was my second reading of this book - I read it first 10 years ago (yikes!) and, as I was slogging through, I realised that I had forgotten many of the details of the storyline; it was the characters that I remembered. 
 This is just a good story - no shocking ending or great mystery really. There are lots of twists and turns in the plot as Prior Philip and Tom Builder work to get the cathedral built - enough to keep the reader interested. The book is pretty long, at 983 pages - I read quite a few other books in between - but I will probably pull this one out again at some point.