Este senhor conquistou-me com "Os pilares da Terra" e penso que será difícil a sua suplantação... Talvez um dia Ken Follett me surpreenda...

Ainda assim, esta trilogia é fabulosa! Talvez este seja o volume "menos bom" dos três, mas leva as 5* por ser o fecho de quase 3000 páginas da história do nosso século XX, que tão brilhantemente foi aqui retratada. E não poderia ter melhor final do que a queda do muro de Berlim!

Bravo, Ken Follett, uma vez mais...

I will miss these families... so much!
This last volume was simply sublime.
Everything was epic, the magnificent storyline, the development and growth of the characters, the neat descriptions of all situations and the easy and clean writting.
This is by far, one of the most complete stories that I´ve ever read.

“They’re Americans when they win races, and when they get conscripted into the army,’ Dave said. ‘But they’re Negroes when they want to buy the house next door to yours.”

“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. ‘I have a dream that one day, on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down to gether at the table of brotherhood – I have a dream. ‘That one day even the state of Mississippi – a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of op pression – will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream.’

“...half the people in London were not English anyway: they were Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Caribbean, Indian and Chinese. All the drug dealers came from islands: Maltese men sold pep pills...”

“Despite being some of the most powerful people in the world, the top men in the Kremlin were scared of stepping out of line. Marxism-Leninism answered all questions, so the eventual decision would be infallibly correct. Anyone who had argued for a different outcome was therefore revealed to be culpably out of touch with orthodox thinking. Dimka sometimes wondered if it was this bad in the Vatican.”

“You can’t tell what a tyrant is going to do,” she said. “Uncertainty is one of their weapons. I’ve lived under the Nazis as well as the Communists. They’re depressingly similar.”

Marvelous! I just re-lived my life.
After The Fall of Giants and Winter of the World, Ken Follet's 3rd part of the trilogy of the 20th century, The Edge of Eternity, is definitely the icing on the cake!
In this book he covers the last part of the 20th century, starting in the early 60s. The fiction is masterly written in an accurate historical context.
For those who lived through these decades, you will be surprised how much you didn't know. For those who are interested in the history of our former century, this is a very captivating way to find out how our world today was shaped.

Follett knows how to make you turn the pages. He's a master story teller. But this was a rush job, to the point of being insulting. Would a character in the 1970s really say "yada, yada"? For some reason that annoyed me more than the repeated paragraph, the ponderous recaps,
one dimensional characters and mawkish, cliché ridden writing.

All the same I had to finish it - more fool me.

I once heard Ken Follett speak, at a B&N in Manhattan, at a time when he was a world-class writer of thrillers who had just written his first historical novel. He was asked what was his favorite book to write and he said it was Pillars of the Earth. He explained how challenging and enriching it was to study the history and then to shape a story to present that history in a compelling manner. That is surely what he has done ever since, in a series of historical novels, and I don't think he ever wrote another thriller. I have just studied Part I of Edge of Eternity, plotting out each chapter and scene and comparing Follett's work to my own novel-in-progress. I learned a lot about how Follett structured his novel, as well as enjoying the beginning of a superb story.

Novel Ideas group read October 2014.

A political and cultural review of the 1960's. Follett places his characters in the immediacy of history (similar to John Jakes). The second half lost punch because one political leaning was emphasized. I think he padded an already long book with an overabundance of salacious scenes and showed definite gender bias. The book needed a good editor. My opinion is that the last in this series is the least compelling. What a shame. It was a far cry from The Pillars of the Earth which established Follett as a historical fiction genius.

Long, long long and boooooring. I would say the first of this trilogy was the best...the second was only ok, and this one was not very good. I just didn't care about the characters, what happened, etc. It was not suspenseful or engaging. Sorry Ken Follett, I love you but not this book!

Foi uma das melhores trilogias que li. Adorei as relações estabelecidas entre as personagens históricas e as personagens fictícias e o seu enquadramento histórico-cultural.

4.5 Stars.

This trilogy is clearly ambitious detailed and meticulously crafted. I rated the first 2 of the series in the 5-5+ range, but this one was a bit more of a drag and that could be dependant on my interest in the source material ie world politics and human rights movements of the Cold war Era.

It has to be said that John Lee is an excellent narrator and for the approximate 120 hrs. Of run time I was mostly captivated throughout and I will likely seek out more of his work. Now onto pillars of creation in a few months.

Just finished Winter of the World, and I cannot wait for the next one!

An amazingly trilogy-would rank it with Harry Potter and Hobbit series-is that good. Rich characters with fantastic dialogue as the books take you through our last century. Show characters, warts and all-just like real people. I highly recommend this book and read them in order for full enjoyment.

I really liked the first book in this trilogy, and the second one was okay -- it was still a fast read despite being over 900 pages. This one, however, would not end.
The highlight of the book was the Cuban Missile Crisis and things just went downhill from there. I don't think that I actually cared about any of the characters, other than the ones from the previous books that he was killing off without much ado.
Also, the epilogue was bad in a very Harry-Potter-epilogue-esque way, totally unnecessary and took away from the real ending of the Berlin Wall coming down.