Fall of Giants — Ken Follett

A thirteen-year-old Welsh boy enters a man's world in the mining pits....An American law student rejected in love finds a surprising new career, in Woodrow Wilson's White House....A housekeeper for the aristocratic Fitzherberts takes a fateful step above her station, while Lady Mapd Fitzherbert herself crosses deep into forbidden territory when she falls in love with a German spy.... And two orphaned Russian brothers embark on radically different paths when their plan to emigrate to America falls afoul of war, conscription, and revolution.

From the dirt and danger of a coal mine to the glittering chandeliers of a palace, from the corridors of power to the bedrooms of the mighty, Fall of Gianis takes us into the inextricably entangled fates of five families -- and into a century that we thought. we 'knew, but that now will never seem the same again....