Sorry I haven't posted for a while but have had "life" stuff going on which has been taking up most of my spare time. It has also impacted on my reading time and so it feels like I have been trying forever to finish Ken Follett's latest offering.
"Fall of Giants" is the first in Follett's Century Trilogy and at over 800 pages long, isn't for the faint hearted but in my opinion is well worth the effort. I am a huge fan of Ken Follett as he has written two of my favourite novels- The Pillars of The Earth and World Without End and was excited to read his latest saga.
The story takes place before, during and after the First World War and follows the lives of a group of multi-national characters who are all connected in some way. It looks at the conflict from their differing perspectives and the difficult choices they have to make.
The story is well researched and moves along at a good pace. The characters are interesting, diverse and believable and I found myself caring about what happened to them.
As always, Follett's pace of writing suits my reading style.In Follett's own words
"My aim in constructing sentences is to make the sentence utterly easy to understand, writing what I call transparent prose. I've failed dreadfully if you have to read a sentence twice to figure out what I meant."
I found this to be true for the majority of the book and if I have one criticism it is that there was perhaps too much focus on the battles and behind the scenes politics and not enough on the lives of those who were left behind.
Having said that, it is only a minor fault and didn't detract from my overall enjoyment of the book. I wouldn't say that I was as captivated by the story as in "Pillars" or "World Without End" but still rank it as an excellent book and would give it 8 out of 10. I look forward to reading the rest of the trilogy when it is completed.
Maybe it's a guy thing in respect to the battles? Long descriptions of battles get to me in a historical fiction book.
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