

As always with Ken Follett, the historical background is brilliantly researched and rendered, the action fast-moving, the characters rich in nuance and emotion.

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. 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. 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 The first novel in The Century Trilogy, it follows the fates of five interrelated families≺merican, German, Russian, English, and Welshas they move through the world-shaking dramas of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the struggle for women's suffrage. Fall of Giants is his magnificent new historical epic.
