I read the first of this trilogy – Fall of Giants. It was excellent. Winter of the World continues in the same superlative fashion. The narrative is quick and absorbing. Through the eyes of interesting characters, you get a front row seat in the most memorable historical events that were really not that long ago. The first book took me inside the world my grandparents experienced. This one transported me into the events that shaped my parents. The book provides in-depth perspectives and describe...

Just finished my second read through. I’m so happy to dive back into this trilogy full of amazing characters. This book makes me the most uncomfortable—it deals with the most lose and offers little relief to the reader. For every triumph you see another character pushed to the breaking point.

Ken Follett's second book in his Century trilogy ' Winter of theWorld ' is turning in to an excellent dramatisation of Eric Hobsbawm's ' The Age of Extremes '. It has all the ingredients of ' Fall of Giants ' easy to read, absorbing, intriguing and never far from actuality of the age. I would recommend this book to anyone who is not really into History but likes a cracking story.

An interesting long....................long.................... read but not up to the standard of Pillars or Fall of Giants.

The second in Follett’s Century Trilogy follows the main characters from Fall of Giants and their children as they navigate the major events of the 1930s and 1940s. Readers will see the rise of Nazi Germany, the epic battles of World War II, and the birth of the atomic era through the eyes of men and women from several countries.Winter of the World is a grand accomplishment, and one of the most thoroughly enjoyable books I’ve read this year. I’m looking forward to the next installment. The novel...

I DID IT hell yeahSo, I didn't enjoy this one quite as much as the first one but I still did love it. These books are so fascinating because they manage to cover so much information in only 900 pages. This one gave such an interesting perspective on World War II and the homefront. I love how you get to see all of the facets of the war, not just the battles. The characters were lovable as it follows the children of the characters from the first book so I felt like I already knew them. My one issu...

Congratulations, Ken Follett! You've taken the most destructive conflict this world has ever seen and turned it into a wan and tawdry soap opera! Worse yet, you have cribbed unmercifully from Herman Wouk's Winds of War. I'm assuming Kenny is hoping that readers will be unaware that a 40-plus-year-old book already covered the same globe-trotting style and settings that is the backbone for both novels. If that was his aim, I can only envy the readers who haven't sampled Wouk's superior effort. Per...

My rating would have been 2 and one-half stars if Goodreads had given me the option. Plus I think the divergence of this review from the "average" of the reviews for the book is as much due to the cognitive dissonance of not "really enjoying" a book that you've slogged thru 960 pages to complete, than a passionate embrace of "Winter."As much as I liked the first volume of Follett's 20th Century Trilogy -- Fall of Giants -- I was disappointed by this second installment. The back cover blurb: "The...

5 stars for the entertainment level. This was a page turner for me.This book has been sitting on my shelves since its release, but mostly because I wasn’t ready to face its size (313k words, 940 pages and the audiobook is 32 hours at normal speed).As with “Fall of Giants”, which I read back in May of 2020, I don’t feel guilty for taking me this long.This is another ambitious work of fiction by Ken Follett. Here he covers the years between 1933 and 1949.I was hooked from the beginning and I did n...

A little disappointed by this volume ... Too much romance, hard-to-believe coincidences and twists and turns. I suppose Part One of the trilogy would suffice ... Most characters act unnaturally or unbelieveably, and at times it feels like Mr Follet struggles to connect the loose ends. I survived despite the book being rather long, mainly to John Lee, the narrator, who in my opinion found it challenging to keep the straight face. This is a good book but definitely not a masterpiece and I will not...

A journey through the horrors of World War 2 through the eyes of different people from England, the USA, Russia, and of course, Germany. This starts with the NSDAP taking over German politics in 1933 and ends in 1949 with the separation of Germany into West and East. Reading these 1000 pages was an emotional roller coaster. After loving the Fall of Giants (centered around WWl) I had very high expectations. The historical content definitely didn't disappoint. Various POVs introduced British, Amer...

I was a fan of Ken Follett's previous books (Pillars of the Earth, World Without End, and, to an extent, Fall of Giants) but I really didn't enjoy this book. I felt like he "phoned it in" or rushed to get it out quickly, which was disappointing. My main problems with the novel were: 1) unrealistic dialogue 2) extremely predictable plot points 3) characters you don't really care about (although I did have a warm spot for Daisy) and 4) lack of nuance/complexity in characters. However, I did think

Fall of Giants, Book One of Ken Follett’s The Century Trilogy, had ended in January 1924 at the finish of World War I and the Russian Revolution, showing a nine-year-old boy shaking hands with his father. Book Two, Winter of the World, commences in February 1933, with eleven-year-old Carla in the kitchen of her Berlin home wondering what her parents, English born Maud, and German born Walter von Ulrich, were arguing about. Book One’s readers would also be unsure what the quarrel was for, as they...

Well, I just finished this thing and I did like it, but not as much as the first installment.The best part of this novel is the history, Follett is able to distill it into bite size little nuggets and integrate the info into readable dialogue. I learned a ton about China and her role in the remaking of the UN, new information on why Japan was so aggressive during the run up to Pearl Harbor, atomic bomb development in the US, and many other historical antecedents of the Cold War.Follet just about...

I was a First Reads winner! I feel so lucky that I won a copy of this book. I have a habit of opening a book and reading the first couple of sentences in the book. If it doesn't grab my attention I have a hard time reading on. I can't actually review this book yet because I am not quite done with "Fall Of Giants" yet, which I insist on finishing first. I am really enjoying that book so far. I love the setting and the characters are interesting. I very much want to see what becomes of them. I di

Ken Follett is a mediocre writer, but a stellar storyteller. His characters are cardboard, his dialogue wooden and on the nose, his prose pedestrian and perfunctory. As for his punctuation of dialogue: ugh. I said: "Please take away Follett's colon key, stat." (No, Ken, a colon is not interchangeable with a comma.)But still - the pages demand to be turned.WINTER OF THE WORLD picks up right after FALL OF THE GIANTS, with the sons and daughters of the latter novel's characters facing the Spanish C...

*** 3 ***Since I am on hiatus from writing reviews for the month, being a beach bum 😀, I just wanted to note that this was another typical for the author work of Historical Fiction. However, maybe it is me, maybe it is the fact that I grew up in the Eastern Block and have some knowledge of the history there, the author 's prejudices are even more obvious and no matter how unwillingly they might creep up, they hamstring him and put his writing in a box much too small for the scope he intends. I a...

Ken Follett seems to enjoy a longevity that would be the envy of Kafka or Nietzsche. If you weren't aware, I'm talking about his long life, not his hegemony. Follett is also without doubt a very successful author, who has hundreds of thousands of fans around the world. I'm not going to join that particular club.Follett's book, Winter of the World, has clues littered over its face as to the secret of its success, just like a naughty kid has crumbs over his maws after pilfering the cookie jar. The...

Classic Follett. An ensemble cast, but nearly doubled in size since the last book, as it’s been twenty years and another generation has reached maturity. This book covers the period from the rise of the Nazis to the beginning of the cold war, following the personal stories of British (Welsh), German, and American characters. There would be five or six pretty good novels in this enormous tome, each focused on one or two of the characters, but Follett’s style is to blend them all together. This wo...

The 20th century is the most dramatic and violent period in the history of the human race. We killed more people in the 20th century than in any previous century, in the trenches of World War I, in the Soviet Union under Stalin, in Germany under the Nazis, Spain under Franco. There was World War II and the bombing of Dresden by the British and Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was a horrible century and yet it is also the century of liberty.Very few countries were democratic before the First World War....