Fall of Giants: Ken Follett’s First World War Epic of Five Families and the Russian Revolution
The Great War told from its beginnings, 1914 to 1918, and the situation of Germany, France, Britain, Russia, the United States and Italy, seen through the eyes of five different families. Fall of Giants is the first volume of Ken Follett’s Century Trilogy.
Author: Ken Follett (born 1949)
Title: Fall of Giants (2010), book one of the Century Trilogy
Format: English Kindle edition, 865 pages
Scope: Historical novel
Amazon: www.amazon.es/dp/B005I65BHS (ASIN B005I65BHS)
The Horror of War
The horror of war, poverty and injustice: it is hard to put ourselves in the place of those who had to live through it every day. The novel covers the Russian Revolution, the fall of the Tsarist regime and the rise of Lenin’s.
Love Across the Lines
The rivalry between Germans and British during the First World War means some marriages have to take place in secret so as not to upset either family. Espionage and smuggling become a reality. The dream of some Russians of getting a ticket to America makes the end justify the means.
Life in the Trenches
We adapt to everything, even in the most terrible moments: soldiers cling to the memory of their old, quiet life and do everything they can to endure the cold and disease of the trenches and return home to their families. The soaring price of bread and the forced conscription of the young are common to every country.
Five Families
The story follows a group of linked families: the Williamses, a Welsh mining family, including the housekeeper Ethel and her brother Billy; the Fitzherberts, aristocrats who own the mines, among them Earl Fitzherbert and his sister Lady Maud; Walter von Ulrich, a German diplomat; the Peshkov brothers, Grigori and Lev, workers in St Petersburg; and Gus Dewar, a young American adviser to President Wilson. Their lives cross in the drawing rooms, coal mines, trenches and revolutionary streets of a world about to change for ever.
Ken Follett
Born in Cardiff in 1949, Ken Follett worked as a journalist before achieving success with the wartime thriller Eye of the Needle (1978). In 1989 he published The Pillars of the Earth, a vast novel about the building of a medieval cathedral, which became his best-loved book and led to the Kingsbridge series. With Fall of Giants he applied the same epic approach to the twentieth century.
The Century Trilogy
Fall of Giants opens a trilogy that follows the same families and their descendants through the century. Winter of the World (2012) covers the rise of fascism and the Second World War, and Edge of Eternity (2014) takes the story through the Cold War to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Each novel can be read on its own, but together they form a sweeping panorama of modern history.
History Made Vivid
Follett mixes his fictional characters with real figures such as Winston Churchill, Lloyd George, Lenin and Woodrow Wilson, and he works hard to get the historical details right. Some critics find the dialogue simple and the characters schematic, but few novelists make complex events, such as the diplomatic failures that led to war, as easy to follow.
Who Will Enjoy It
Readers who love long, immersive family sagas, and anyone who wants to understand the First World War and the Russian Revolution through human stories.
Votes for Women
In Britain, 1918 stands out as the year some women won the right to vote: they had to be over thirty and meet a property qualification. Follett’s novel follows the suffrage campaign through one of its most memorable characters, and it ends as the world tries to rebuild after the war.
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