Rutherfurd attended the University of Cambridge and Stanford Business School, where he earned a Sloan fellowship.
[2] He abandoned his career in the book trade in 1983 and returned to his childhood home to write Sarum, a historical novel with a ten-thousand year story, set in the area around the ancient monument of Stonehenge and Salisbury.
[3] Sarum was published in 1987 and became an instant international best-seller, remaining for 23 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List.
[4] Rutherfurd settled near Dublin, Ireland in the early 1990s, but currently divides his time between Europe and North America.
Using this framework, he chronicles the history of a place, often from the beginning of civilisation to modern times – a kind of historical fiction inspired by the work of James Michener.