Ken Follett · 2010 · global

Ken Follett's 2010 novel, first of the Century Trilogy. Five families - Welsh miners, English aristocrats, a German officer, a Russian pair of brothers and an American diplomat - are carried through the First World War, the Russian Revolution and the fight for the vote. The book moves between the coalface, the front, the palace and the peace conference.

1. 1
   Aberowen

   In a south Wales mining town, a boy goes down the pit on his thirteenth birthday and his sister goes into service at the local earl's house - the two ends of a class system the book spends nine hundred pages taking apart.

2. 2
   London

   In London the earl and his circle move through the diplomacy of 1914 in the confident expectation that none of it will come to anything, while the suffrage campaign runs in the streets outside their windows.

3. 3
   Petrograd

   In Petrograd two brothers take opposite roads out of the same factory - one to America, one into the revolution - and the war that was supposed to strengthen the Tsar takes his throne instead.

4. 4
   The Somme

   On the Somme the Welsh miners go over the top and are cut down in the first hour, and the German officer watches the same battle from the other side of the wire - the point at which the old certainties stop being arguable.

5. 5
   Washington

   In Washington an American aide watches his president decide to enter the war and then lose the peace - and the survivors come home to countries in which the giants of 1914 have fallen and nothing has replaced them.