Fall of Giants — The Century Trilogy, Book 1

Five Families, One Century

Follett’s most ambitious novel opens in a Welsh coal mine in 1911, where thirteen-year-old Billy Williams descends for his first shift. By the time Fall of Giants ends, in 1924, Billy will have survived the Somme, witnessed the Russian Revolution, and returned to Wales to find that everything the old world promised working men has been broken and not yet replaced.

The Welsh mining family is one of five whose lives Follett traces across the convulsion of 1914–1924. The Fitzherberts are English aristocrats who believe the world is arranged for their benefit and will discover how comprehensively that world can end. The von Ulrichs are German cousins — one a diplomat, one a soldier — who support a war they understand will be decided against them. The Dewars are American brothers, one of whom will work in Woodrow Wilson’s White House. And the Peshkovs are Russian brothers separated by the Revolution, one joining the Bolsheviks, one fleeing to America.

The War as Mechanism

Follett’s structural decision — to show World War One from inside five different national experiences simultaneously — is his most formally sophisticated choice in a career of large formal ambitions. The readers see the same battles from both sides of the wire. They see the diplomatic failures that made the war inevitable as the product of specific human decisions rather than impersonal historical forces. They see how the war looked from Washington, where entering it was a political choice with domestic consequences.

The effect is not relativistic — Follett has clear views about where moral weight falls — but it is genuinely illuminating. The war’s causes, conduct, and consequences emerge with unusual clarity from the interplay of perspectives.

The Russian Revolution

The Russian sections are the novel’s most electrifying. Follett follows the February and October Revolutions through characters on multiple sides: the aristocrats who cannot believe it is happening, the idealists who believe they are building a new world, the pragmatists who understand that the new world will require the same instruments of power as the old. The depiction of Petrograd in 1917 is vivid and specific, and Follett does not flinch from the violence that accompanied liberation.

The Human Scale

At nearly a thousand pages, Fall of Giants requires commitment. What Follett provides in return is the conviction that history happened to specific people who felt it as personally as any contemporary reader would — who loved and argued and made catastrophic miscalculations and sometimes got things right. The intergenerational thread that will run through the full trilogy begins here, and the investment in these families earns interest across all three volumes.

Our rating: 4.4/5 — Follett’s most historically panoramic novel, delivering the cataclysm of World War One and the Russian Revolution through five families whose interconnected lives make the century’s defining catastrophe feel human-scaled and urgently real.

Reading Order

1. Fall of Giants ← you are here
2. Winter of the World
3. Edge of Eternity

Reading Guides

• Books Like The Count of Monte Cristo: 11 Epic Adventure and Revenge Classics
• Books Like Outlander: 11 Epic Historical Romances You
• Books Like The Pillars of the Earth: 11 Epic Historical Novels You Won
• Books Like The Nightingale: 11 Powerful WWII Novels You Need to Read
• Ken Follett Books in Order: Kingsbridge and Century Series Guide (2026)

A New Kind of Series

Fall of Giants, published in 2010, opens the Century Trilogy and represents a deliberate widening of Follett’s canvas beyond the medieval world of Kingsbridge. Where the Kingsbridge novels anchor themselves to a single English town, the Century Trilogy follows five interlinked families — Welsh, English, German, Russian, and American — across the defining catastrophes of the twentieth century, beginning with the First World War and the Russian Revolution. The structural ambition is to render history as something experienced simultaneously from inside five national perspectives, so that the same war is seen from both sides of the wire and from the diplomatic rooms where its course was decided.

The Choices Behind the Catastrophe

What distinguishes the novel from conventional war fiction is its insistence that the cataclysm was not fate. By braiding the five family threads, Follett presents the war’s causes, conduct, and consequences as the product of specific human decisions made at specific junctures — decisions that could have gone otherwise. The Russian sections, following the February and October Revolutions through aristocrats, idealists, and pragmatists in turn, are the most electrifying in the book; Follett does not flinch from the violence that accompanied liberation, nor pretend that any single viewpoint holds the whole truth. The recurring theme is betrayal: a working class that experienced the war as a broken promise made by a ruling class that exempted itself from the consequences.

The Long Game

At nearly a thousand pages, Fall of Giants is the opening movement of a much larger structure, and its real payoff is intergenerational — the families introduced here recur, through their children and grandchildren, across the two volumes that follow. The investment the reader makes in these people earns compound interest across the whole trilogy, which is the case Follett’s defenders make for committing to the scale.

The Families as a Method

The five-family structure is not merely a way to cover a lot of ground; it is the argument made formal. By giving the Welsh miners, the English aristocrats, the German cousins, the Russian brothers, and the American Dewars equal narrative weight, Follett ensures the reader never settles into a single national myth of the war. The same conflict is a tragedy of broken promises in the Welsh valleys, an unravelling of inherited certainty in the English country house, a foreseen defeat in Berlin, and a revolution viewed from three irreconcilable angles in Petrograd. Some of the threads are stronger than others — the American brothers are noticeably thinner than the Welsh and Russian material, and the romantic subplots are functional rather than inspired — but the architecture holds. What emerges is a portrait of the early twentieth century as a sequence of human choices rather than an impersonal fate, and a foundation solid enough to carry the two volumes that complete the trilogy.