Ken Follett follows up his #1 New York Times bestseller Fall of Giants with a brilliant, page-turning epic about the heroism and honor of World War II, and the dawn of the atomic age.
Source: Winter of the World by Ken Follet
It has been quite a while since I read the first book in the Century Trilogy, Fall of Giants, which was the first book I read by Ken Follet. I remember enjoying it very much and have been looking forward to finally getting around to read the 2nd book in the series. I would say that it didn’t quite live up to my expectations but it was still enjoyable and I will certainly keep the 3rd book in the series on my reading list.
The one thing that struck me reading Winter of the World was how simplistic the structure and characters were. This is quite a long book at nearly 1,000 pages so there was plenty of time to build up a reasonably complex story despite this. This wasn’t something I really noticed in the first book and it might just be jumping out at me now because I’ve been reading a lot of Dickens lately. The story is always the most important thing and this was still a good one.
The Century Trilogy is a work of historical fiction and covers, presumably, all or most of the 20th century (I haven’t read the last one yet). While the first book, Fall of Giants, covered the early part of the 20th century, this book covered from not long after World War I to a few years after World War II. The next one covers primarily the Cold War as I understand it. While some of the same characters appear, each book concentrates on the next generation from the same families. This is the second large trilogy of “historical fiction” I have read, the first being Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle so it sort of invites comparisons for me.  Neal Stephenson is probably my favorite living author and the Baroque Cycle is a little different in nature and also takes place in a completely different time period (the Enlightenment) so there really isn’t too much of a comparison to be made other than they are both rather large trilogies of, roughly speaking, historical fiction. I only mention this because it was my enjoyment of the Baroque Cycle that sort of piqued my interest in the genre and made me interested in the Century Trilogy when I first saw it.
I rate books as follows: 1 star = so bad or boring I couldn’t even finish it, 2 stars = got through it but probably wouldn’t have picked this one if I had it to do over again, 3 stars = good story, enjoyed it and would recommend it but probably not something I will ever re-read, 4 stars = awesome book, look forward to re-reading it again one day, 5 stars = one of my all-time favorites. Using this scale, this was probably a 3 star book. Worth reading and a relatively quick read despite the length.
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, etc.). It’s kind of interesting as Brad Thor strikes me as an anti-central banking sort of person. This book talked a lot about the history and negative aspects of the Federal Reserve. Here’s a link and summary from Amazon: