Rebecca’s life takes an early gut punch when she learns that her husband, Hans, is a member of the East Germans secret police and married her only to spy on her family. They live in an East Germany that has not yet been walled off from the West. Carlos Alvarez/Getty ImagesĬarla and Rebecca are alive and well as “Edge of Eternity” begins. Throughout the series, real leaders of nations and movements have had an uncanny way of confiding their most personal thoughts to Mr. Some of these fictitious characters had a way of being conveniently positioned very, very close to power one American is on hand to awaken President Wilson during a nighttime crisis and see him emerge from his bedroom wearing pajamas and a dressing gown. Follett created five families - Russian, English, Welsh, German and American - whose fates personalized historical events.

That was tricky business, since “He kept us out of war” had been Wilson’s 1916 second-term campaign slogan. “Fall of Giants” swept through the Russian Revolution, the struggle for women’s suffrage, the upstairs-downstairs outrages perpetrated by Britain’s male aristocracy, the verboten love affair between an Englishwoman and a German spy, the new world opening to immigrants fleeing Europe for the United States, and President Woodrow Wilson’s worries about bringing America into World War I. And yet he has already drawn readers through the trilogy’s first two installments of global upheaval. He has a limited lineup of other methods. Follett’s favorite way to keep history interesting. (Duration: half a page out of 1,098.) This is Mr. They cheer, and then they start kissing, and wind up having fantastic sex. They have been platonic friends for years.

So a man and a woman sit watching Nixon’s fall.

And for him, the political is always very personal. That moment is part of “Edge of Eternity,” the last and fattest installment in Ken Follett’s 20th-century trilogy. Nixon announce his intention to resign as president of the United States. 8, 1974, many Americans gathered before their television sets to watch Richard M.

Follett century trilogy