AUTHOR’S BIO
Ken Follett was born on June 5, 1949, in Cardiff, Wales. He received his degree in philosophy in 1970
from University College in London. His first job was as a trainee journalist and rock music columnist
at the South Wales Echo from 1970-73. He started writing fiction when he needed money for car repairs.
He told the Chicago Tribune: “It was a hobby for me. You know, some men go home and grow vegetables.
I used to go home and write novels.” He became a full-time writer in 1977 and had
written his first bestseller before he turned thirty.
Many of his early novels, published under various pseudonyms, were murder mysteries or crime fiction
based on cases he covered as a reporter. It was his 11th book, Eye of the Needle, that was described
as “quite simply the best spy novel to come out of England in years.” Follett’s heroines are so realistically
portrayed that the author has been able to lure female readers to his novels that traditionally appeal to men.
In 1989, Ken Follett took a break from his highly successful thrillers and penned The Pillars of the Earth,
his first of three historical novels. Critics were skeptical but Pillars became his most popular book.
Follett has taken readers from the resistance underground of World War II Paris,
to the brutality of the Scottish mines of the 18th Century, to 1958 and the height of the Cold War
in the U.S. and beyond. He enjoys the label of “popular writer” and says,
“I’m not under the illusion that the world is waiting for my thoughts to appear in print.
People want to be told a story, and that’s what I’m up to.”
KIRKUS REVIEW
Another sprawling, multigenerational, continent-spanning saga from long-practiced pop-fiction writer
Follett (Winter of the World, 2012, etc.).
One might forgive the reader for taking Follett’s title literally at first glance; after all, who has time for the
eternity of a 1,100-plus–page novel, especially one that’s preceded by a brace of similarly hefty novels?
Happily, Follett, while not delivering the edge-of-the-seat tautness of Eye of the Needle (1978), knows how
to turn in a robust yarn without too much slack, even in a book as long as this.
The latest and last installment in the Century Trilogy spills over into our own time, closing with
Barack Obama’s electrifying speech in Chicago on winning his first term as president—an
emotional moment, considering the struggle some of Follett’s protagonists have endured to
see it happen.
His Freedom Riders make plenty of history of their own, risking violence not just for stirring
up the disenfranchised, but also for engaging in more personal forms of protest.
One, George Jakes, comes near the top of Follett’s dauntingly long dramatis personae
(in which more than 100 named characters figure); he’s a crusader for justice and often in fraught places
at the times in which he’s most needed.
George has his generational counterparts behind the Iron Curtain, some of them pretty good guys
despite their Comintern credentials, along with a guitar-slinger from East Germany swept into
the toppermost of the poppermost in the decadent West. (“They quickly realized that San Francisco
was the coolest city of them all. It was full of young people in radically stylish clothes.”)
Follett writes of those young hipsters with a fustiness befitting Michener, and indeed there’s a
Michenerian-epic feeling to the whole enterprise, as if The Drifters had gotten mashed up with
John le Carré and Pierre Salinger; it’s George Burns in Pepperland stuff. Still, fans of Follett won’t
mind, and, knowing all the tricks, he does a good job of tying disparate storylines together in the end.
A well-written entertainment, best suited to those who measure their novels in reams instead of signatures.
THE AUDIOBOOK
Well read by John Lee who is the expected voice for the entire series.
The audio book is 36 hrs and 55 mins long.
Watch YouTube video of Ken Follett introducing Edge of Eternity YouTube.
