Creator / Ken Follett

Kenneth Martin Follett CBE FRSL (born 5 June 1949) is a British author. Although most of his novels are thrillers (and many of those have been best-sellers), he is more widely known (especially in the USA) as the author of The Pillars of the Earth, an epic historical novel.

Books by Ken Follett

The Kingsbridge series

• The Pillars of the Earth (1989)
• World Without End (2007)
• A Column of Fire (2017)
• The Evening and The Morning (prequel, 2020)
• The Armour of Light (2023)

The Century Trilogy

Has its own page

Standalone

• The Modigliani Scandal (originally as Zachary Stone, 1976)
• Paper Money (originally as Zachary Stone, 1977)
• Eye of the Needle (1978)
• Triple (1979)
• The Key to Rebecca (1980)
• The Man from St Petersburg (1982)
• On Wings of Eagles (non-fiction, 1983)
• Lie Down with Lions (1985)
• Night Over Water (1991)
• A Dangerous Fortune (1993)
• A Place Called Freedom (1995)
• The Third Twin (1996)
• The Hammer of Eden (1998)
• Code to Zero (2000)
• Jackdaws (2001)
• Hornet Flight (2002)
• Whiteout (2004)
• Never (2021)

Works by Ken Follett that do not have their own page provide examples of:

• All Girls Want Bad Boys: A few examples occur.
  • Lydia in The Man from St Petersburg is drawn to Feliks, an anarchist with whom she had a brief but very passionate relationship before marrying the seemingly dull Lord Walden.
  • Jane in Lie Down with Lions is caught in a love triangle with two bad boys, both of whom are spies (one for the KGB, the other for the CIA).
  • Several women in A Dangerous Fortune are drawn towards the handsome yet utterly dastardly Micky Miranda.
  • Subverted by Lizzie Hallim in A Place Called Freedom. Although she marries into an aristocratic family, she is drawn to rebellious miner Mack McAsh — but Mack, who's motivated by idealism and a yearning for freedom, is actually the hero; it's Lizzie's husband (who she doesn't much like) who's the bad guy.
• Alpha Bitch: Combined with Evil Matriarch in the case of Augusta Pilaster in A Dangerous Fortune. She will gladly manipulate people she wishes to cultivate into being her friends, lie in order to blacken the names of potential rivals (and family members she does not like), go out of her way to stir up trouble for said rivals (and family members), and connive to cover up murders committed by those close to her.
• Betty and Veronica: Gender-flipped in The Man from St Petersburg. As a young woman in 1890s St Petersburg, Lydia was in love with a Veronica (Feliks, an anarchist) but had the opportunity to marry a Betty (the British aristocrat Lord Walden). She went for the latter, although it was not entirely her own choice, and moved to England. Her past comes back to bite her when Feliks turns up in London in 1914, throwing her carefully cultivated life into turmoil.
• Big Brother Instinct: Danny Robinson in A Dangerous Fortune displays this when he finds out that his sister Maisie is pregnant and unmarried — although she's quick to tell him to knock it off.
• Big, Screwed-Up Family: The Pilasters, a banking family in Victorian London, are this in A Dangerous Fortune. Their numbers include an Alpha Bitch, a Closet Gay (who is blackmailed over this by the alpha bitch), a Depraved Bisexual (who several characters suspect of being a murderer, although it's eventually revealed that he isn't) and a White Sheep.
• Born into Slavery: Explored in A Place Called Freedom, the early part of which deals with a situation in which coal miners and their families in eighteenth-century Scotland are to all intents and purposes slaves as they are bound to the mine for their entire lives — it being customary for the mine owner to give a gift to parents at the time of a child's baptism, which binds the child to work in the mine alongside the parents when it grows up, thus perpetuating the situation.
• Canon Welding: In A Dangerous Fortune, some of the characters go to stay at Kingsbridge Manor, the country home of the Duke of Kingsbridge. Kingsbridge is the fictional town in which The Pillars of the Earth and its sequels (World Without End, A Column of Fire) are set.
• Chekhov's Gunman: The Third Twin has two. Pete Ferrami is a career burglar who seems irredeemable after he steals from his own daughter, who let him stay in her house after he was released from prison. However, his skills come in useful when she needs someone to break into her former place of work in order to get hold of crucial evidence that drives the plot. Charles Logan, a US Army officer who works in the Pentagon, proves to be another as he illicitly allows the protagonists to gain access to the computers there, which helps to resolve the plot.
• Clone Army: The scandal at the heart of The Third Twin is a secret US government project aimed at creating one of these. Back in the early 1970s (just over two decades before the novel's setting), the embryo of a "perfect soldier" was created and copied — with eight women, all of whom were married to US Army soldiers and who had enrolled into a clinic due to experiencing fertility issues, getting impregnated with those copies. The resulting babies grew up to be tough but somewhat maladjusted young men, two of whom are in prison (three, by the end of the novel).
• Depraved Bisexual: Edward Pilaster in A Dangerous Fortune turns out to be one of these, given that he is only capable of having sex with a woman after watching his best friend Micky Miranda have sex with said woman. This leads his wife, who initially believes him to be impotent, to go to extreme lengths in order to get him to conceive a child with her, although this fails. Later on in the novel, Edward is revealed to be suffering from syphilis due to his many years of depravity; somehow, Micky escapes this fate (which he attributes to his having always washed himself after sex, something Edward never bothered to do).
• Diplomatic Impunity: For much of A Dangerous Fortune, Micky Miranda is the Cordovan Minister in London, giving him diplomatic immunity from being brought to book for the many crimes he commits.
• Everyone Has Standards: Being a devout Methodist, Seth Pilaster, the ailing head of the family bank in the early part of A Dangerous Fortune, may be a ruthless businessman but he will have no truck with any transaction involving guns and ammunition.
• Evil Twin: As might be deduced from the title, one of the main characters in The Third Twin has two of these. More than two, in fact.
• False Rape Accusation: A variant is at play in The Third Twin, given that a brutal rape happens early on but the wrong man — Steven Logan, one of the novel's main characters — is arrested for it. Unfortunately for him, not only does the victim pick him out of the police line-up, he's a match for the DNA evidence. Turns out, the perpetrator was a man who is genetically identical to Steven — they, and several other men, are the product of a secret experiment in genetic engineering that took place just over two decades before the events of the novel take place.
• Fictional Country: A Dangerous Fortune gives us Cordova, a South American republic that has a capital called Palma, a province called Santamaria, Atlantic and Pacific coastlines and a history of political corruption and instability. None of the story's action actually takes place there (the novel is almost entirely set in London), but events in the country feature strongly and guide the actions of the main antagonist, who's from there.
• Gene Hunting: The Third Twin has a variant, in that two young men — Steven Logan (a college student) and Dennis Pinker (a convicted murderer) — are genetically identical despite having been born to different women on different dates and in different states. The novel's protagonist, Jeannie Ferrami, runs DNA tests on both of them which proves that they are, in fact, identical twins. Turns out, both of their mothers were treated at around the same time by the same fertility clinic, which was at the time heavily involved in a secret genetic engineering project aimed at creating and cloning a biologically perfect "super-soldier"; their mothers were unknowing guinea-pigs who were impregnated with the cloned embryos. Steven and Dennis are therefore the results of this project — and, as the title of the novel suggests, they are not the only ones.
• Historical Domain Character: Plenty of examples.
  • George Washington appears in A Place Called Freedom.
  • Of particular note is Winston Churchill who, as a Cabinet Minister in the Asquith government on the eve of World War I, is instrumental in getting Lord Walden to enter into negotiations with a representative of the Russian government in The Man from St Petersburg, thus setting up the entire plot of that novel; at the end, he plays a low-key but crucial role in the climax. Also appearing in that novel are George V, Queen Mary, Emmeline Pankhurst and Asquith himself, the latter being the only one of those that any of the main characters actually interacts with.
  • Elizabeth I is a major supporting character in A Column of Fire.
  • A couple of characters in A Dangerous Fortune are friends with Edward VII (at the time, the Prince of Wales).
• Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: The Man from St Petersburg and A Dangerous Fortune both have characters whose fathers may not be the men their mothers are married to. In the former, Charlotte Walden is eventually revealed to be the biological daughter of Feliks the anarchist, not Lord Walden. In the latter, Bertie Greenbourne is actually the son on Hugh Pilaster, not Solly Greenbourne; Solly is aware that Bertie is not his, but does not know who the actual father is; he is nevertheless willing to marry the mother, Maisie Robinson, despite her being pregnant with another man's child, and does nothing to dissuade those outside his family of the notion that Bertie is his son. The fact that he and Hugh are good friends does not exactly make things easy for Maisie.
• Momma's Boy: Edward Pilaster in A Dangerous Fortune is one of these; hardly surprising, given that his mother is an Alpha Bitch Evil Matriarch.
• Nice Guy: Solly Greenbourne and Hugh Pilaster in A Dangerous Fortune; in the case of the latter, this makes him the White Sheep of the family.
• Non-Idle Rich: Exemplified by Lord Walden in The Man from St Petersburg, as he plays an active part in the running of his estate and is perfectly willing (after some persuasion) to represent his country in delicate diplomatic negotiations with Russia. When it becomes clear that a Russian anarchist is trying to kill his opposite number, he gets involved in the hunt for said anarchist.
• Parents as People: Lord and Lady Walden in The Man from St Petersburg, who meant well when they decided to give their daughter Charlotte a particularly sheltered upbringing. When she becomes a young adult, Lord Walden in particular realises that they did the girl a disservice in this respect, and he tries to rectify the situation. However, he's got a lot of other stuff going on (such as trying to negotiate a military alliance with Russia while simultaneously trying to prevent an anarchist from killing the Russian aristocrat he's negotiating with), and as far as Charlotte is concerned it becomes increasingly apparent that his belated efforts are a case of too little, too late.
• Pen Name: When starting out as a novelist in the 1970s, Follett used pen names like Bernard L. Ross and Zachary Stone. He only started using his own name with Eye of the Needle (1978), his first successful, best-selling work. Some of his less successful earlier novels were later republished under his own name.
• Police Brutality: The Baltimore Police Department, as depicted in The Third Twin, seems to specialise in this.
• Really Gets Around: Berrington "Berry" Jones, one of the antagonists of The Third Twin, is a serial womaniser. In an idle moment, he tries to figure out how many women he has slept with in his life, but gives up — although he knows that the number is well into three figures (and during the course of the novel, the time period of which is just over a week, he beds two more). Despite the fact that this was the main reason for the breakdown of his marriage, he remains on good terms with his ex-wife.
• Shout-Out: A major plot element of The Key to Rebecca is Daphne du Maurier's novel Rebecca, which is used as a code book by the German spy ring in wartime Cairo.
• Someone to Remember Him By: A couple of examples in A Dangerous Fortune — Dotty Pilaster was born after her father's suicide and, in a non-fatal example, her brother's lover only finds out that she's pregnant (from the one time they had sex) after he is forced to move to the USA.
• Time Skip: Done a few times. For example, A Dangerous Fortune has a prologue set in 1866 followed by parts set in 1873, 1879 and 1890, ending with an epilogue in 1892.
• Very Loosely Based on a True Story: Several of his novels set during World War II fall into this category.
  • Eye of the Needle deals with Operation Fortitude, the Allied counter-intelligence plan to convince the Germans that the D-Day Landings would take place in Calais, not Normandy. The First US Army Group (FUSAG), a military command that existed on paper only, was part of this deception in Real Life as well as in the novel. In the latter, a German spy finds out about the deception...
  • Alex Wolff, a character in The Key to Rebecca, is heavily modelled on the Real Life German spy Johannes Eppler. The presence of German spies in Cairo during the North African campaign has been used as a plot device by other authors, notably Michael Ondaatje and Len Deighton.
  • Hornet Flight is to all intents and purposes a fictionalised retelling of actual events concerning Danes escaping from their (German-occupied) country to Britain in de Havilland Hornet Moth biplanes. In Real Life, there were at least two separate instances of escapes from occupied Denmark using this particular type of aircraft.
• "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: Sometimes used. The Man from St Petersburg, for example, ends with a brief summary of what happened to Charlotte afterwards, asserting that she is still alive (perfectly plausible, given that she was 18 in 1914 when the events of the novel occurred, and the novel was first published in 1982, by which time she would be 86).