Fall of Giants

What's inside (9 sections)

1. Aberowen, coal, and the Williams kids
2. Grigori and Lev, and the Russia that is about to crack
3. 1914, and how a continent talks itself into war
4. The Somme, and what the trenches do to class
5. Petrograd, Lenin on a train, and two revolutions
6. Votes for women, America in, and an uneasy peace
7. What drags, and who should try it anyway
8. Key takeaways
9. FAQ

I picked up Fall of Giants because I wanted a single book that would put World War I in order in my head, and at 985 pages in the 2010 Dutton edition it certainly promises that. Ken Follett published it in 2010 as the first volume in the Century Trilogy, and it follows five linked families from 1911 to 1924 through coal pits, country houses, trenches, Washington offices, and Petrograd factories. I expected battles and treaties. I did not expect to care so much about a Welsh housemaid who learns to run a newspaper, or a Russian factory hand trying to buy a train ticket for his brother. That is the trick of this book. It uses soap opera mechanics to carry a shelf of history, and for long stretches it works.

The setup is simple. We follow the Welsh Williams family, the English Fitzherberts, the German von Ulrichs, the Russian Peshkovs, and the American Dewars. Their children hire each other, marry each other, and shoot at each other while kings and presidents move them around. Follett keeps chapters short and the view hopping, so you learn the Somme, the Russian Revolution, American entry, and the fight for the vote through people instead of dates.

Aberowen, coal, and the Williams kids

We open in June 1911 in Aberowen, a fictional coal town in South Wales. Billy Williams is thirteen and going down the pit for his first shift on his birthday. The cage drop, the dark, the dust in the throat, the older men watching to see if he panics. His father, David Williams, is a union and chapel man, serious about safety and wages. His mother, Cara, keeps a crowded house with warmth and sharp talk. Billy is small for his age but observant, already asking why managers do things a certain way.

Ethel Williams is Billy's older sister, working as housekeeper at Tŷ Gwyn, the big house owned by Earl Fitzherbert, called Fitz. She reads, she argues, she notices money. Fitz is in his late twenties, rich, handsome, conservative, sure that the order of things is natural. His sister, Lady Maud Fitzherbert, is in her early twenties, tall, outspoken, active in the suffrage movement. Their house party in the summer of 1911 sets half the plot in motion.

Two foreign guests arrive for the house party. Walter von Ulrich is a young German aristocrat and military attache in London, polite and thoughtful, trying to keep peace between Germany and Britain while serving his own country. Gus Dewar is an American, son of Senator Cameron Dewar, working as an aide and hungry to understand how Europe works. Both men notice Maud. Both file away what they learn about British power.

Ethel's story turns fast. Fitz charms her, she becomes pregnant, and when she tells him he hands her money and expects silence. She refuses. She loses her job, goes home to Wales in disgrace, and faces parents who love her but live by chapel rules. Follett does not keep her a victim for long. Ethel starts organizing, speaks at union meetings, writes leaflets, learns that her gift is plain talk that makes tired people listen.

Maud's story runs beside Ethel's. Maud is rich where Ethel is poor, but both run into the same wall. Maud marches, gets jostled by police, writes for a suffragette paper, argues with her brother at dinner. She falls for Walter, and he falls for her. He is German. She is English. Their countries are building dreadnoughts and rehearsing war plans. What starts with witty talk at Tŷ Gwyn turns into coded letters and secret meetings in London.

Grigori and Lev, and the Russia that is about to crack

In St. Petersburg, Grigori Peshkov works in the Putilov factory, a huge metalworks that feeds the Russian army and railway. He is loyal to his younger brother Lev to a fault. Lev is charming and reckless, always with a scheme, always in trouble with foremen or police. When Lev gets into a fight that could get him killed, Grigori scrambles to buy him a ticket to America to save his life.

Follett uses the brothers to show how Russia worked before the war. Police watch the factories. Foremen steal. Wages buy less each year. Grigori believes in workers organizing and reads in the evenings. He loves Katerina, a young woman with a child, and tries to do right by her even when Lev tangles that up too.

Lev sails steerage, lands in Buffalo, and works in hotels and factories while getting mixed up with gangsters and union men. Gus Dewar, meanwhile, works his way up in Washington as an assistant to President Woodrow Wilson. Gus believes in reform and memos. Lev believes in survival. Grigori stays in Russia and believes his brother will send money and behave. Only one of those beliefs holds.

1914, and how a continent talks itself into war

One of the best parts is the slow slide from 1911 to August 1914. Follett does not present the war as fate. He shows men choosing it, telegram by telegram. Fitz moves between London clubs and Paris meetings. Walter is back in Berlin, warning his superiors that Britain will fight if Germany marches through Belgium. Otto von Ulrich, Walter's father, thinks war will cleanse Germany.

Gus is in Washington and then in London as an observer, writing reports for Wilson. He likes Walter. He respects Maud's mind. His chapters explain American neutrality from the inside. Wilson wants peace, trade, reelection, and distance from a European bloodbath. Gus learns that wanting all those at once is hard.

When Archduke Franz Ferdinand is shot in Sarajevo in June 1914, Follett keeps the focus on his characters reading the news and missing the scale. Walter rushes between embassies. Fitz votes and argues. Billy hears talk in the institute library. Grigori hears it in the factory. Nobody ordinary wants a world war. Alliances, mobilization timetables, and pride do the wanting for them. By August, Britain declares war on Germany. Ethel's baby is born. Maud and Walter marry in secret before he must leave England.

The Somme, and what the trenches do to class

The war chapters are long on kit, guns, gas, and trench routine. Billy enlists with other Aberowen boys. He is bright enough to be noticed and stubborn enough to argue with stupid orders, which gets him both promoted and punished. He serves in the Welsh Rifles, digs, carries, watches friends die from shells and bad planning. Fitz serves as an officer, brave in a conventional way, furious when his men are wasted, still blind about why the men distrust him.

Walter serves on the German side, first in the east and then in the west, with intelligence work, front line spells, and a wound that puts him in a hospital bed. Walter is as decent as Billy. He loves Maud. He hates the same mud. Gus is still civilian, visiting Europe, seeing the war from staff rooms and hospitals, reporting back that the Allies need America.

The Somme in 1916 is the center of the military story. After a week long bombardment the generals expect wire and machine guns to be smashed, then order the walk forward on July 1 into intact defenses. Billy is there. Fitz is there in command. Casualties are staggering. Follett names names you have learned, then kills some quickly and leaves others with wounds. Shared rum. A dry dugout. A letter from home read aloud.

Courage is common and leadership is rare. Billy learns to lead from the front because he came from the pit and knows how men talk when officers leave. Fitz learns, more slowly, that birth does not teach you how to take a trench. Walter learns that being right about strategy does not save men under your orders.

Petrograd, Lenin on a train, and two revolutions

The Russian chapters from 1914 to 1917 are the strongest history here. Grigori is drafted, serves as a soldier, sees bad rifles, bad boots, bad food, and officers who treat peasants as expendable. He survives retreats and winters while the cities hunger. In Petrograd, women queue for bread in the cold. Strikes spread. The Tsar loses touch with everything outside the palace.

Follett walks you through February 1917 in the old calendar, March in ours. Soldiers refuse to fire on crowds. The Tsar abdicates. A Provisional Government tries to keep the war going while promising reform. Grigori, now a seasoned soldier, is elected to a soviet. He argues for bread, peace, and land. When Lenin arrives at the Finland Station in April, helped by Germans who think he will wreck Russia, Grigori hears the slogans and recognizes their power.

The October Revolution, November by western dates, is staged street by street. Follett keeps Grigori in the middle without making him a superman. He carries messages, guards railways, talks deserters into discipline. Lev has built a messy life in America and misses the meaning of what his brother is doing. One brother makes revolution. The other makes money in ways that will not bear inspection.

This is also where Follett is clearest about women doing political work men later claim. Katerina survives war and shortage. Factory girls march. Nurses treat typhus with almost nothing. Ethel and Maud in London raise money, write, and lobby while their husbands and lovers are away. Soldiers fill the streets, but Follett keeps cutting back to kitchens and queues where the revolution starts.

Votes for women, America in, and an uneasy peace

Gus Dewar's arc carries American entry. He works for Wilson through the Lusitania sinking in 1915, the 1916 election, the Zimmermann Telegram and unrestricted submarine warfare in 1917. Follett shows Wilson as stubborn and tired, not a cartoon. Gus moves from observer to officer, lands in France, sees what fresh American divisions mean for a tired German army.

In Britain, Ethel builds a new life. She works for a socialist newspaper, rents rooms, raises her son. She speaks for Labour, for unions, for mothers who need clinics and schools. She quarrels with men who think socialism means men talking while women make tea. Maud, married secretly to a German, lives under suspicion. She nurses, writes, and pushes for a negotiated peace when that view is called treason.

The vote comes, but not all at once. The Representation of the People Act in 1918 gives some women the vote at thirty with property rules. Ethel is furious at the limits and practical about using them. She organizes registration drives. The full equal franchise does not arrive in Britain until 1928, after this book ends, and Follett is honest that 1918 is a door half opened.

The end of the war brings Versailles and the Paris peace conference, where Gus watches Wilson try to sell the League of Nations. Fitz argues for a hard peace. Walter, ruined in defeated Germany, hears the terms with disbelief. Billy comes home to a Wales that promised heroes a new country and offers unemployment instead. Grigori, now a Bolshevik official, watches civil war close in. Lev returns briefly with American money, and the brothers face what they have become.

The book closes in 1923 and 1924, with a Labour government and Ethel finally in Parliament. That move felt earned because we watched her learn every skill she uses there. Maud and Walter find a fragile peace. Gus finds work he can respect. Billy votes, organizes, and marries. Grigori keeps building a state that is hardening in ways he avoids naming.

What drags, and who should try it anyway

Fair criticism, because a 985 page book should be judged like a long stay. Follett leans on coincidence. People who should never meet keep meeting at dinners, stations, and battlefields. Lev survives scrapes that would finish most men. The sex scenes are frequent and written in the same plain style as the battles, which some will enjoy and others will skim. The dialogue sometimes turns into history lessons, with characters telling each other things they both know. Fitz starts as a snob and ends as a sadder snob, and Bea, his Russian wife, never quite becomes a person.

Length is the real test. There are stretches, especially in the middle war years, where chapters feel like rotation. Trench, hospital, office, factory, letter, repeat. I felt it around page 600 and started checking how much was left. Then the Russian collapse pulled me back. If you like family sagas, you will forgive the padding because you get reunions and betrayals. If you want tight literary fiction, this is not that.

Read it if you want World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the suffrage fight in one story with names attached. Pair it with a short history for dates and maps, because Follett moves fast across fronts. A chapter a night works better than a binge, since the view jumps can blur if you rush. I finished liking Billy and Ethel best, respecting Grigori, worrying about Walter and Maud, and feeling fonder of Gus than I expected.

For scale, the Dutton first American edition runs 985 pages and the story ends with Labour taking office in January 1924. The Century Trilogy continues with Winter of the World and Edge of Eternity, following the children through World War II and the Cold War. You do not need all three now. Fall of Giants stands alone. If the last fifty pages leave you wanting Ethel's son and Maud's children, the next book is waiting.

FAQ

Is Fall of Giants the first book in a series?

Yes. It is book one of the Century Trilogy, followed by Winter of the World and Edge of Eternity, which follow the children of these families through World War II and the Cold War.

Does Fall of Giants cover women's suffrage?

Yes. Ethel and Maud organize, write, and lobby, and the book follows the 1918 Representation of the People Act that gave some British women over thirty the vote.

How accurate is the history in Fall of Giants?

The major events match the record, from the Somme in 1916 to the revolutions of 1917 and the Labour government of 1924, though private meetings and coincidences are invented for story.