...later and this morning I finished reading Ken Follett's latest book "Fall of Giants". I am always so disappointed when I finish one of Mr Follett's stories! I just want them to go on forever to see happens in the lives of the characters! This is the first book of a trilogy with the next one due out in 2012 then the 3rd due out in 2014. Oh No!!!
As a hard cover with 850 pages, it wasn't the most comfy book to curl up on the lounge with, but the fabulous story line made it all worth it.
Sadly I don't think I will achieve "50 books in 2010" now though. But with a 24 hour plane trip coming up plus 5 weeks in Dublin where the weather won't be condusive to spending much time outdoors - you never know what could be achieved!
From Ken Follett's w
ebsiteFall of Giants
Published worldwide on 28 September 2010, and debuted at #1 on The New York Times' hardcover fiction bestseller list!
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.
