Ken Follett · 2014 · global

Ken Follett's 2014 novel, the last of the Century Trilogy. The grandchildren of the original families live through the building of the Berlin Wall, the missile crisis, the American civil rights movement, Vietnam, the Prague Spring and the fall of the Wall - the same five families, on every side of a Cold War none of them chose.

1. 1
   Berlin

   The Wall goes up overnight in August 1961 and cuts a city in half, and the German family is divided across it - one escape attempt by car through a checkpoint setting the tone for the twenty-eight years that follow.

2. 2
   Washington

   In Washington the American strand runs through the Kennedy White House and the civil rights campaign - freedom rides, Birmingham and the march on the capital, with the same family that appeared in the trenches in 1916.

3. 3
   Havana

   The missile crisis is played out over thirteen days in which very few of the people deciding it have accurate information - and the book's method, putting fictional aides in real rooms, works best here because the stakes are plain.

4. 4
   Moscow

   In Moscow the Russian brothers' children serve a state they can see is failing, one inside the KGB and one increasingly outside everything - and the reforms that will end it are already being argued about in private.

5. 5
   Prague

   The Prague Spring is crushed by tanks in 1968 and the last illusions go with it - and the trilogy ends with the Wall coming down, and the families' grandchildren watching a century close that their grandparents opened.