Books like Fall of Giants
On the day of George V's coronation in 1911, thirteen-year-old Billy Williams goes down a Welsh coal mine for the first time, and his family's story winds with those of an English earl, a German diplomat, two Russian brothers and an American idealist through the First World War and the Russian Revolution.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Fall of Giants
And Quiet Flows the Don
Grigory Melekhov, a young Cossack in a village on the Don, falls for his married neighbour Aksinia before the First World War and the Revolution tear his world apart.
Doctor Zhivago
A poet and a woman torn between him and a Bolshevik commander live through the Russian Revolution and Civil War, and the landscape of Russia becomes a character.
The Eighth Life
Six generations of a Georgian family unfold across a century of Soviet violence, chocolate, and love, addressed by a great-aunt to her niece.
Zoya
Countess Zoya Ossupov, a cousin of the Romanov children, flees the 1917 revolution with her grandmother to Paris, where she dances in the ballet to survive, and her life carries her on to New York through the Jazz Age, the Depression and another world war.
August 1914
The Russian army's invasion of East Prussia in August 1914 and its disaster at Tannenberg, seen through officers, soldiers and families across Russia.
The Pillars of the Earth
A master builder in twelfth-century England devotes his life to constructing a cathedral, and the project spans decades of war, famine, and political intrigue.
The World and All That It Holds
Rafael Pinto, a Sephardic pharmacist from Sarajevo, is conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian army in 1914 and falls in love with a fellow soldier, Osman, and the war and the century carry them across half the world.
Raised from the Ground
The peasants of a Portuguese estate endure a century of feudal oppression, and Saramago gives voice to the people history usually ignores.
The Thibaults
Two brothers, Antoine, a dutiful young doctor, and Jacques, a rebel who runs away from school, grow up under their overbearing Catholic father in Paris in the years before the First World War.
Mater 2-10
Jino, a laid-off factory worker staging a sit-in on top of a factory chimney, remembers four generations of his family of railway workers, from Japanese colonial rule through war and dictatorship to modern Korea.
Birdsong
In 1910 Stephen Wraysford, a young Englishman sent to Amiens to learn the textile trade, falls in love with the unhappy wife of his host; six years later he is an officer in the trenches a few miles away.
The Good Earth
A Chinese peasant marries an unloved kitchen slave, and across forty years of drought, revolution, and unexpected wealth they rise and the land goes on telling them what they are.