Ken Follett: "Fall of the Giants", "Winter of the World", "Edge of Eternity"This is a very ambigious novel project with the purpose of telling the entire history of the world through the twentieth century, through three thick volumes on altogether more than 3000 pages. We follow four families through three generations, one american, one british, one german and one russian. What these families have in common is that their members are very close witnesses to all major historical person and events. and can give us eyewitness testimonies about what happened. At the same time Follett manages to picture them as personalities that we believe in and feel sympathy or antipathy for, depending on how they act. The most fantastic thing is that he manages to sew this enormous material together to a story that we are able to follow and get so engaged in that it is hard to put it aside before one has worked oneself through alle the more than 3000 pages. Ken Follet is a nearly sinisterly professional writer, who has made an enormous effort of research before writing this story. He was born in Wales in 1949 and made his breakthrough with the novel "The Needle" in 1974. Since then he has written very many bestsellers, and he estimates that he has sold around 90 millions books around the world. |
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