Winter of the World

The Nazis take power in Berlin, and Carla von Ulrich loses her father, murdered on a Gestapo officer's orders. As a nurse, she helps the Resistance pass plans to the Soviets. Her brother Erik backs Hitler until he sees massacres of Jews in Russia. Welshman Lloyd Williams fights in the Spanish Civil War and helps airmen escape occupied France. Daisy Peshkov marries Viscount Boy Fitzherbert and drives an ambulance in the Blitz. Woody Dewar loses his fiancée at Pearl Harbor, and his brother Chuck dies in the Pacific. In the end, Carla raises her son and a Jewish girl she protected, Lloyd marries Daisy, and the book closes in 1949 with the Soviet bomb.

1. Behind the scenesA plan with dates

   By 2010 Follett had the plan: book two would open in Berlin in 1933, with Hitler's rise, and come out in 2012; book three in 2014. Both arrived on schedule.

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2. Behind the scenesWhy it doesn't stop in 1945

   Follett didn't want to end with the war. He said that would give a false suggestion that all problems were solved. So the story runs to 1949.

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3. Behind the scenesExplaining the Nazis

   Nobody thinks the Nazis were good, Follett said, but a novelist still has to explain why they succeeded. So the book shows the war from many nations' points of view, Britain's being only one.

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4. Behind the scenesNo right length

   About the near-thousand pages, Follett said there's no right length for a novel: it should go on as long as the story is good. He hopes readers finish thinking it should have been longer.

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5. ReferenceThe next generation

   Most of the leads are the children of Fall of Giants characters. Nearly every woman in the first book ends up with one or two kids, who hit their teens in the 1930s.

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