Fall of Giants
Ken Follett, 2010
History Historical fictionPopular science
Five families, a Welsh mining boy, and the First World War: a historical saga about ordinary people caught in the machinery of empire.
Feels like dread and wonder. About war, ambition and family.
A page from the book
A soldier wonders whether the human race deserves the world it is destroying.
Men were the only animals that slaughtered their own kind by the million, and turned the landscape into a waste of shell craters and barbed wire. Perhaps the human race would wipe itself out completely, and leave the world to the birds and trees, Walter thought apocalyptically. Perhaps that would be for the best. Ken Follett.Ken Follett’s first bestseller was the spy thriller Eye of the Needle; he later built the Century Trilogy around five families whose lives intersect across the twentieth century.
Books that feel like this
More by Ken Follett
The Pillars of the Earth
Ken Follett, 1989
A master mason risks his family’s safety to chase the building of a cathedral in 12th-century England, where faith and power collide.
World Without End
Ken Follett, 2007
In fourteenth-century Kingsbridge, four children who witness a secret grow into adults divided by ambition, faith and plague. Follett’s medieval world is grimy, gripping and full of moral price.
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Questions readers ask
- What is Fall of Giants like?
- Feels like dread and wonder. About war, ambition and family.
- What should I read after Fall of Giants?
- If you liked Fall of Giants, try The Women (Kristin Hannah), North and South (John Jakes) and Dead Wake (Erik Larson).
A taste of the feed
How fast a quiet street becomes a firing line.
They had taken no more than a dozen steps away from the cottages when a musket barrel came smashing through an unbroken window in one of the cottages ahead. The door flew open, three more muskets poked out. The muskets boomed, killing two of the surprised soldiers a yard to Orry’s left.
North and South · John Jakes
A ship can hide its lights but not its silhouette.
With all but a few lights extinguished and all shades pulled and curtains drawn, the great liner slid forward through the sea, at times in fog, at times under a lacework of stars. But even in darkness, in moonlight and mist, the ship stood out. At one o’clock in the morning, Friday, May 7, the officers of a New York–bound vessel spotted the Lusitania and recognized it immediately as it passed some two miles off. “You could see the shape of the four funnels,” said the captain, Thomas M. Taylor; “she was the only ship with four funnels.”
Dead Wake · Erik Larson
The argument you have with yourself before doing the frightening thing.
The idea made her sick and scared, but so what? Why did it matter if something scared you, when it simply had to be done anyway?
The Alice Network · Kate Quinn
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