Ken Follett · 2012 · global

Ken Follett's 2012 novel, second of the Century Trilogy, following the children of the families from Fall of Giants. It runs from the Nazi seizure of power through Spain, the Blitz, Stalingrad and Pearl Harbor to the building of the bomb - five families on every side of a war that none of them can stay out of.

1. 1
   Berlin

   In Berlin a German family watches the Nazis take power in stages, each one deniable until it is not - and a young woman ends by working for the resistance from inside a ministry, which is the most dangerous job in the book.

2. 2
   London

   In London the Welsh mining family's children come up through politics and the Blitz, and the argument about appeasement is conducted in Parliament by people who will shortly be conducting it in the air.

3. 3
   Stalingrad

   On the Eastern Front the Russian brothers' generation fights the war that decides it - Stalingrad in the rubble and the cold, where an entire German army is surrounded and the direction of the whole thing reverses.

4. 4
   Pearl Harbor

   At Pearl Harbor the American strand of the story stops being about isolationism, and the war becomes what it will be for the rest of the book - global, industrial and fought by everyone the first novel introduced.

5. 5
   Los Alamos

   In the New Mexico desert the bomb is built, and the book ends with the world the third volume will have to live in - and with the same families, older, discovering that winning has not settled anything.