Winter of the World by Ken Follett

Winter of the World is the sequel to Follett's sweeping novel Fall of Giants. The first chronicled several families during the early 20th century, including the Great War (World War I). Follett picks up the threads of those tales and starts this novel in the early 1930s, just a few years after the conclusion of Fall of Giants. Here we see the sons and daughters of the primary characters in the earlier novel as the main characters, with some of the now slightly older generation appearing here and there. The Leckwiths, Fitzherberts, and Peshkovs are all back and playing their roles in changing the world. It is the younger set that find themselves in harms way, or conveniently in specific situations that allow the author to tell the broader tale of the times, from Stalin's non-aggression pact with Hitler to Roosevelt's meeting on a warship with Churchill to create the United Nations. Gus Dewar appears again, now a United States Senator, and he and his son Woody are in Hawaii to visit Chuck, a navy intelligence officer, when the Pearl Harbor attacks happen. Like Fall of Giants, students of history can see events unfolding long before they occur in the novel.

Like Follett's other epic stories (including Pillars of the Earth and World Without End), this enormous book is easy to sink into and enjoy. While the convenient character placement sometimes seems a little heavy-handed just as a method to tell a larger tale of history, the individual storylines and the relationships between the characters help bring a good perspective to the larger sweep of history. I don't know that I can be patient for the third volume. If you haven't read the first in this trilogy, do that first. It's not a must, as this could easily stand on its own. It just makes a lot more sense to have the backstory from Fall of Giants available to you before you read Winter of the World.