Edge of Eternity: Ken Follett (The Century Trilogy, 3)

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Its sequels, World Without End and A Column of Fire , proved equally popular, and the Kingsbridge series has sold 38 million copies worldwide. If you lean liberal and need to have your fantasy world upheld by books where liberals can do no wrong and conservatives can do nothing but, this is definitely the book for you. None such for the Gipper, but I think part of that is that the story starts to go off the rails a bit in the 80's. The phone rings, you pick it up, there’s a silence for a few seconds, then the person at the other end hangs up.

Follett was equal in his treatment of both types as far as sexuality, writing soap opera scenes of infidelity for all, including President John Kennedy and the communists.

Maud dies, Grigory is visited on his death bed, what about the rest of the characters we loved and hated? The Communists denied that Red Army soldiers had committed rape, even though every woman who had been in East Germany in 1945 knew the horrible truth. As Steve Donoghue of Open Letters Monthly notes, however, this approach to the historical novel follows a conceit commonly used in historical fiction, saying its "oldest gimmick in the historical fiction bag of tricks, the eyewitness-to-history trick in which the author invents a character or cast of characters who just happen to be in the room when the great and the mighty eat, fornicate, and make the decisions that change the course of nations. A lot of people are complaining about the end of the book, where the civil rights activists, who have been working their whole lives to help people of color gain equal rights, are excited that Obama became president.

And the Civil Rights movement is very interesting - I hadn't known much about it before so this helped to fill me in.

Then his eyes widened in shock as he accepted the reality of what he was seeing, and his mouth opened a fraction. While the book is not without flaws, including a lack of representation of South Asian perspectives and an omission of important events in the Middle East, it remains one of my favorite novels in the genre.