肯·福莱特 Ken Follett (1949 -)，现象级畅销小说大师。1978年出版了处女作《风暴岛》，并于次年获得爱伦坡奖，声名鹊起，专职写作。2010年，荣登全球作家富豪榜上第5名。2013年，获得爱伦坡终身大师奖。他的小说出版前，都会请历史学家审读书稿，绝不容许出现任何史实错误。有出版人曾指出，肯·福莱特 “没有一个饱受折磨的灵魂”，他愉快地承认了，“大家都在写内心的痛苦，可我总是觉得很开心”。他说：“很多作家只写能取悦他们自己的东西，并模模糊糊地希望这也能取悦别人。但我每写一页都在清醒地思考：读者会怎么想？读者觉得这真的会发生吗？读者关心这些吗？读者想要知道接下来会发生什么吗？我敬佩那些用文字和新奇结构进行文学实验的作家，但我从不这么玩。”

作者官方网站：www.ken-follett.com

Follett takes you to a time long past with brio and razor-sharp storytelling. An epic tale in which you will lose yourself."

-The Denver Post on World Without End

Ken Follett's World Without End was a global phenomenon, a work of grand historical sweep, beloved by millions of readers and acclaimed by critics as "well-researched, beautifully detailed [with] a terrifically compelling plot" ( The Washington Post ) and "wonderful history wrapped around a gripping story" ( St. Louis Post- Dispatch )

Fall of Giants is his magnificent new historical epic. The first novel in The Century Trilogy, it follows the fates of five interrelated families-American, German, Russian, English, and Welsh-as they move through the world-shaking dramas of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the struggle for women's suffrage.

Thirteen-year-old Billy Williams enters a man's world in the Welsh mining pits...Gus Dewar, an American law student rejected in love, finds a surprising new career in Woodrow Wilson's White House...two orphaned Russian brothers, Grigori and Lev Peshkov, embark on radically different paths half a world apart when their plan to emigrate to America falls afoul of war, conscription, and revolution...Billy's sister, Ethel, a housekeeper for the aristocratic Fitzherberts, takes a fateful step above her station, while Lady Maud Fitzherbert herself crosses deep into forbidden territory when she falls in love with Walter von Ulrich, a spy at the German embassy in London...

These characters and many others find their lives inextricably entangled as, in a saga of unfolding drama and intriguing complexity, Fall of Giants moves seamlessly from Washington to St. Petersburg, from the dirt and danger of a coal mine to the glittering chandeliers of a palace, from the corridors of power to the bedrooms of the mighty. As always with Ken Follett, the historical background is brilliantly researched and rendered, the action fast-moving, the characters rich in nuance and emotion. It is destined to be a new classic.

In future volumes of The Century Trilogy, subsequent generations of the same families will travel through the great events of the rest of the twentieth century, changing themselves-and the century itself. With passion and the hand of a master, Follett brings us into a world we thought we knew, but now will never seem the same again.