By Ken Follett
Ken Follett's superb new historic epic starts, as 5 interrelated households go through the momentous dramas of the 1st global warfare, the Russian Revolution, and the fight for women's suffrage.
A thirteen-year-old Welsh boy enters a man's international within the mining pits....An American legislation pupil rejected in love unearths a shocking new occupation in Woodrow Wilson's White House.... A housekeeper for the aristocratic Fitzherberts takes a fateful step above her station, whereas woman Maud Fitzherbert herself crosses deep into forbidden territory whilst she falls in love with a German spy....And orphaned Russian brothers embark on considerably diversified paths whilst their plan to to migrate to the US falls afoul of struggle, conscription, and revolution.
From the airborne dirt and dust and risk of a coal mine to the glittering chandeliers of a palace, from the corridors of strength to the bedrooms of the robust, Fall of Giants takes us into the inextricably entangled fates of 5 families—and right into a century that we notion we knew, yet that now won't ever look an analogous again....
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Example text
But our lovemaking had been very real, and I yet treasured the memory. Nor, I told myself, would I forget this one, for I’d never been inside the vast structure that housed the queen’s wardrobe, that which was not of immediate need and kept at Whitehall Palace. I’d adored Elizabeth of England from the first moment I’d seen her, gorgeously gowned, on a white horse, when I was but eleven and she’d come to visit her favorite, the Earl of Leicester, near my home in Warwickshire. The boy led me round the corner into an alcove hidden from the street.
I asked, for a man as important as Edward Arden in this area owed direct allegiance to Leicester. He shook his head and leaned closer. “More like, he’s foregone it. Leicester’s been as mean as that bear on the tunics. He pesters and prosecutes recusants, and Cousin Edward’s spleen is up over it. ” Recusants were those with Catholic loyalties or leanings. They were recorded and fined if they didn’t attend the Protestant church. In the early days of her reign, the queen had commanded that everyone could keep his conscience private, but since several attempted Catholic plots and rebellions, she’d let her advisors convince her to change her policy.
We seemed to have passed from attire to military materials. As we rounded the next corner, my worst fears leaped at me from the shadows. Within a dimly lit grotto of garments, behind a small portable table sat a man simply but finely attired all in black; his amber eyes shone flatly, like an adder’s. It took me but a moment to realize I knew him—that is, I knew who he was. I had glimpsed him at court the time the players had taken me with them. His hunchback form was unmistakable. For months, the whole city had talked of naught but the bloodless battles between this man and the Earl of Essex.