After three years in Cardiff, he returned to London as a general-assignment reporter for the
Evening News. Finding the work unchallenging, he eventually left journalism for publishing and became, by the late 1970s, deputy managing director of the small London publisher Everest Books.
Further successes Success came gradually at first, but the 1978 publication of
Eye of the Needle, which became an international bestseller and sold over 10 million copies, made him both wealthy and internationally famous. Each of Follett's subsequent novels has become a best-seller, ranking high on the
New York Times Best Seller list; a number have been adapted for the screen. As of January 2018, he had published 44 books. The first five best sellers were spy thrillers:
Eye of the Needle (1978),
Triple (1979),
The Key to Rebecca(1980),
The Man from St. Petersburg (1982) and
Lie Down with Lions (1986).
On Wings of Eagles (1983) was the true story of how two of
Ross Perot's employees were rescued from Iran during the revolution of 1979. The next three novels,
Night Over Water (1991),
A Dangerous Fortune (1993) and
A Place Called Freedom (1995) were more historical than thriller, but he returned to the thriller genre with
The Third Twin (1996) which in the
Publishing Trends annual survey of international fiction best-sellers for 1997 was ranked no. 2 worldwide, after
John Grisham's
The Partner. His next work,
The Hammer of Eden (1998), was another contemporary suspense story followed by a
Cold War thriller,
Code to Zero (2000). Follett returned to the
Second World War era with his next two novels,
Jackdaws (2001), a thriller about a group of women parachuted into France to destroy a vital telephone exchange – which won the
Corine Literature Prize for 2003 – and
Hornet Flight (2002), about a daring young
Danish couple who escape to Britain from occupied Denmark in a rebuilt
Hornet Moth biplane with vital information about German radar.
Whiteout (2004) is a contemporary thriller about the theft of a deadly virus from a research lab. ,
Finland on
World Book Day in 2005.
Kingsbridge series The five-volume series has been described as "as comprehensive an account of the building of a civilization – with its laws, structures, customs and beliefs – as you are likely to encounter anywhere in popular fiction". On 16 August 2017,
a computer game adaptation by German developer and publisher
Daedalic Entertainment was released. •
World Without End (2007) is its much-later sequel, that returns to Kingsbridge 157 years later, and features the descendants of the characters in
Pillars. It focuses on the destinies of a handful of people as their lives are devastated by the
Black Death, the plague that swept Europe from the middle of the 14th century. •
A Column of Fire (2017) begins in 1558 as the story follows the romance between Ned Willard and Margery Fitzgerald over half a century. It commences at a time when Europe turns against
Elizabethan England, and the queen finds herself beset by plots to dethrone her. •
The Evening and the Morning (2020) is a prequel to
The Pillars of the Earth. Set in the decade around 1000 AD – in the so-called
Dark Ages – the story "concerns the gradual creation of the town of Kingsbridge and of the many people – priests, nobles, peasants, the enslaved – who played significant roles". As such, the book provides "a solid underpinning to the later installments of the Kingsbridge series". The book explores the societal upheaval following the invention of the
Spinning Jenny in 1770. Set against the backdrop of Napoleonic wars and economic transformation, it follows interconnected characters: a widow coping with her husband’s death in a factory accident, a young woman funding a school for impoverished children, a man inheriting a failing business, and a wealthy industrialist protecting his fortune at all costs. Amid war and social change, the story examines the human cost of progress and the struggle to rebuild a fractured world.
Century trilogy Follett's novels,
Fall of Giants,
Winter of the World and
Edge of Eternity, make up the Century Trilogy.
Fall of Giants (2010) followed the fates of five interrelated families – Welsh, American, German, Russian and English – as they moved through the world-shaking dramas of the
First World War, the
Russian Revolution and the struggle for women's
suffrage.
Fall of Giants, published simultaneously in 14 countries, was internationally popular and topped several best-seller lists.
Winter of the World (2012) picks up where the first book left off, as its five interrelated families enter a time of enormous social, political, and economic turmoil, beginning with the rise of
Nazi Germany, through the
Spanish Civil War and the great dramas of World War II, to the explosions of the American and Soviet atom bombs and the beginning of the long Cold War. The final novel in the 'Century' trilogy,
Edge of Eternity, which follows those families through the events of the second half of the 20th century, was published on 16 September 2014. Like the previous two books, it chronicles the lives of five families through the Cold War and civil-rights movements. A major element of the first two volumes,
Fall of Giants and
Winter of the World, is the increasing political assertiveness of the British working class and the rise of the
British Labour Party – exemplified by the Williams Family, Welsh coal miners, of which several viewpoint characters end up as Members of the British Parliament and one of them becomes a cabinet minister in
Clement Attlee's post-WWII Labour government. However, the theme of British politics is nearly absent from the third part
Edge of Eternity, which concentrates on the Cold War on the one hand and the US Civil Rights Movement on the other; for example, though the novel continues until 1989, it makes no reference at all to the rise of
Margaret Thatcher in 1979. == Adaptations ==