After a sequence of spy thrillers, Follett burst onto the historical fiction scene in 1989 with the megahit The Pillars of the Earth, set in twelfth-century England, and nearly two decades later (having written many other novels in the meantime), he followed with a sequel, World without End.His new book inaugurates what is to be a trio of historical novels (called the Century Trilogy), and it duplicates in structure the two novels mentioned above: showcasing the lives of five families from all walks of life and involved in various ways with the issues of the day from the outbreak of WWI to the early 1920s and reflecting these issues over a broad geographical range, the families here being from Britain, the U.S., Russia, and Germany.

The social range of this big, sweeping, completely enveloping novel is announced in the very first line: On the day King George V was crowned at Westminster Abbey in London, Billy Williams went down the pit in Aberowen, Wales.Actual historical figures populate the narrative along with fictional characters, all of whom experience in different ways war, revolution, and the fight for womens rights.