Fall of Giants

Ken Follett “Fall Of Giants,   Thorndike Press (Large Print), 2010 Paperback, 1244 pgs.  

Yup…you read that right: 1244 pages is not a typo--albeit the book has large print.  What makes it worth reading is the characters are all believable and their stories are continually consistent with their character, as well as with the English history of the period, so you get swept right along, just like any good who-done-it book. 

Accordingly, I already have put the second book of the trilogy on reserve at my trusty library.  I have taken to reading a historical fiction at the same time I read something more serious.

This book provides a vivid description of English society beginning in 1911 and ending in the early 1920s as it traces the destruction of the class system in England as well as the rest of Europe in the backwash of WWI.  I find it useful to place this historical period as rather recent considering my Grandmother was born 20 years before the setting of this book.

Quick Overview:

It is 1911. The Coronation Day of King George V. The Williams, a Welsh coal-mining family, is linked by romance and enmity to the Fitzherberts, aristocratic coal-mine owners. Lady Maud Fitzherbert falls in love with Walter von Ulrich, a spy at the German Embassy in London. Their destiny is entangled with that of an ambitious young aide to U.S. President Woodrow Wilson and to two orphaned Russian brothers, whose plans to emigrate to America fall foul of war, conscription and revolution. "Fall of Giants" moves from Washington to St Petersburg, from the dirt and danger of a coal mine to the glittering chandeliers of a palace as five interrelated families move through the momentous dramas of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the struggle for women’s suffrage.