The first in Ken Follett's bestselling Century Trilogy, Fall of Giants is a captivating novel that follows five families through the world-shaking dramas of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the struggle for votes for women.
A world in chaos.
1911, a thirteen-year-old boy, Billy Williams, begins working down the mines as George V is crowned king. The escalating arms race between the empire nations will put not only the king but this young boy in grave danger.
A terrible war.
Billy's family is inextricably linked with the Fitzherberts, the aristocratic owners of the coal mine where he works. And when Maud Fitzherbert falls in love with Walter von Ulrich, a spy at the German embassy in London, their destiny also becomes entangled with that of Gus Dewar, an ambitious young aide to Woodrow Wilson, and two orphaned Russian brothers, the Peshkovs, whose plan to emigrate to America falls foul of conscription, revolution and imminent war.
A revolution that will change everything.
When Russia convulses in bloody revolution and the Great War unfolds, the five families' futures are entwined forever, love bringing them closer even as conflict takes them further apart. What seeds will be sown for further tragedy in the twentieth century and what role will each play in what is to come?
Continue the captivating Century Trilogy with Winter of the World and Edge of Eternity.
Industry Reviews
Follett has managed to write an accessible and fascinating page turner that leaves the reader wanting more, at the same time as staying true to history * Sunday Business Post * An extraordinary achievement * Reader's Digest * An epic saga on a grand scale. Spiked with romance and intrigue . . . This involving historical saga is the perfect read for long winter evenings * Choice * The master storyteller Ken Follett knits together British, American, German and Russian points of view from the start to the end of the First World War into a fascinating and remarkably fertile tapestry of society and politics * The Times * Follett is masterly in conveying so much drama and historical information so vividly * Scotsman * Perhaps no British author better illustrates the forces at work in international publishing than can give birth to, and then grow, a global brand * Independent * Like Follett's classic novel, The Pillars of the Earth, it quickly becomes a guilty pleasure * Daily Telegraph * He's pulled it off again with Fall of Giants: it's classic Follett with the brewing cataclysm of war given a human angle * Sunday Express * Few works set out with such a grand concept as Ken Follett's new Century trilogy, but part one suggests that the series will be one of the literary masterpieces of our time . . . while grand events and themes are at the core of the novel, it is the richness of the characters and the intertwining of their often disparate stories that steal the show * Sunday Times *
