Nonfiction, The Century Trilogy | featured news

In 2010, Ken Follett published “Fall of Giants,” the opening movement of his vast, dauntingly ambitious “Century Trilogy.” In the course of that 1,000-page epic, Follett introduced readers to five families from a variety of countries — England, Wales, Russia, Germany, the United States — and used their lives to illuminate the events of the early 20th century. Those stories encompassed the struggle for women’s suffrage; the increasingly bitter relations between the working class and an entrenched aristocracy; the origins of the 1917 Russian Revolution; and, most centrally, the carnage of World War I, a catastrophic conflict that claimed more than 15 million lives.