But although they don’t know it, two suitors are half-brothers, courtesy of Earl Fitzherbert, the noxious aristocrat who loomed large in the earlier novel. So as debate rages in Parliament in 1940, the brave, handsome Lloyd Williams waits on tenterhooks to see whether the prime minister will be forced to resign.ĭaisy travels to England and quickly finds suitors, deciding to marry the one with the silly nickname (“Boy” Fitzherbert) and serious title (Viscount Aberowen). These books reel in readers with their simple talk, sharp twists and neatly nonsensical way of pairing earthshaking political events with frissons of romance.

Follett writes of a Russian spy involved with a beautiful nuclear physicist at the dawn of the atomic age. “He felt excited, but he was not sure whether that was on account of Zoya or the superbomb,” Mr. “Winter of the World” (covering 1933 to 1949) less strenuously views history through the eyes of purely fictional characters, dim though they may be. Follett felt obliged to reanimate world leaders, from King George V to Woodrow Wilson to Winston Churchill to Leon Trotsky, as characters in his book. “Fall of Giants” spanned from 1911 to 1924, an era of such epic change that Mr. Follett’s third installment will be crowded too.

The second-generation “Winter of the World” crew does enough procreating to ensure that Mr. For another, it dispenses with some of the waxenness of its 985-page predecessor and breathes life into its fictional characters, many of whose parents appeared in the first book. For one thing, it weighs in at 940 pages, which by Follett standards is concise. The second volume of Ken Follett’s Century Trilogy, “Winter of the World,” improves on “Fall of Giants,” the first.

Winter ken follett