A long plane ride and Ken Follett’s Edge of Eternity were perfect together.  Both felt as though they would never end.  Although Follett was rehashing well-known and recent history – from the turbulent sixties to the eighties, with a glimpse of the present –  his clever attention to the details of the lives of those fictitious supporting characters  – the betrayed East German teacher Rebecca Hoffman; George Jakes, the black activist lawyer in Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department; Dimka Dvorkin, a young aide to Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis – offered viable glimpses of how the world may have worked behind the facade, and wanting to know how those lives turned out kept me reading.

Has it really been fifty years since the Kennedy assassination?  The events roll slowly and sometimes painstakingly through Follett’s epic –  almost twelve hundred pages.  The story is not compelling and I fell asleep at times, despite my frequent forays into google to check his facts.  Who was the President when the Berlin Wall came down?  Did you answer Reagan ? (Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall.”)  Follett sets the record straight, and offers his own explanation for the spinning of facts.

I’ve forgotten the story line of the first two books in this series (The Century Trilogy), but Follett conveniently offers some flashback to each family’s history.  No matter; the story of the modern day descendants stands on its own, and Follett’s marathon trilogy is finally finished.

Now I can look forward to another marathon read – the next Jeffrey Archer book – number 5 in the Clifton Chronicles is coming in February.

Related Review:  The Fall of Giants