Fall of Giants By Ken Follett

Fall of Giants is a magnificent new historical epic. The first novel in the Century trilogy, it follows the fates of five interrelated families - American, German, Russian, English and Welsh - as they move through the world-shaking dramas of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the struggle for women’s suffrage. Thirteen-year-old Billy Williams enters a man’s world in the Welsh mining pits. Gus Dewar, an American law student rejected in love, finds a surprising new career in Woodrow Wilson’s White House, two orphaned Russian brothers, Grigori and Lev Peshkov, embark on radically different paths half a world apart when their plan to emigrate to America falls afoul of war, conscription and revolution. Billy’s sister, Ethel, a housekeeper for the aristocratic Fitzherberts, takes a fateful step above her station, while Lady Maud Fitzherbert herself crosses deep into forbidden territory when she falls in love with Walter von Ulrich, a spy at the German Embassy in London. These characters and many others find their lives inextricably entangled as, in a saga of unfolding drama and intriguing complexity, Fall of Giants moves seamlessly from Washington to St. Petersburg, from the dirt and danger of a coal mine to the glittering chandeliers of a palace, from the corridors of power to the bedrooms of the mighty. As always with Ken, the historical background is brilliantly researched and rendered, the action fast-moving, the characters rich in nuance and emotion. It is destined to be a new classic. In future volumes of the Century trilogy, subsequent generations of the same families will travel through the great events of the rest of the twentieth century, changing themselves - and the century itself. With passion and the hand of a master, Ken brings us into a world we thought we knew, but now will never seem the same again.