Showing results by author "Ken Ken" in All Categories

Seft, a talented flint miner, walks the Great Plain in the high summer heat, to witness the rituals that signal the start of a new year. He is there to trade his stone at the Midsummer Fair, and to find Neen, the girl he loves. Her family live in prosperity and offer Seft an escape from his brutish father and brothers, within their herder community. Joia, Neen’s sister, is a priestess with a vision and an unmatched ability to lead. As a child, she watches the Midsummer ceremony, enthralled, and dreams of a miraculous new monument, raised from the biggest stones in the world.

When Emily Lane isn’t busy running her charming Christmas-themed store, “Under the Mistletoe”, located in the quaint tourist town of Fletcher’s Grove, she finds herself compelled to investigate not so quaint local murders.

The Spinning Jenny was invented in 1770, and with that, a new era of manufacturing and industry changed lives everywhere within a generation. A world filled with unrest wrestles for control over this new world order: A mother’s husband is killed in a work accident due to negligence; a young woman fights to fund her school for impoverished children; a well-intentioned young man unexpectedly inherits a failing business; one man ruthlessly protects his wealth no matter the cost, all the while war cries are heard from France.

Half a century after the Doomsday Battle, the uneasy balance of Dark Forest Deterrence keeps the Trisolaran invaders at bay. Earth enjoys unprecedented prosperity due to the infusion of Trisolaran knowledge. With human science advancing daily and the Trisolarans adopting Earth culture, it seems that the two civilizations will soon be able to coexist peacefully as equals, without the terrible threat of mutually assured annihilation. But the peace has also made humanity complacent.

Set against the backdrop of China's Cultural Revolution, a secret military project sends signals into space to establish contact with aliens. An alien civilization on the brink of destruction captures the signal and plans to invade Earth. Meanwhile, on Earth, different camps start forming, planning to either welcome the superior beings and help them take over a world seen as corrupt, or to fight against the invasion. The result is a science fiction masterpiece of enormous scope and vision.

Mathematician Lakshmi Nayak receives a letter from her future self about faster-than-light travel. The equations work, and the letter itself seems to prove the possibility will someday be realized. But her paper on the topic is fiercely criticized, and she's warned away by a sinister Alliance agent. After defecting to the Union, she gets an unexpected offer: "I can build your ship." Shipbuilder John Grant learns of a secret project, which unknown to the world has been traveling to the stars for decades: Black Horizon.

It is June 1941 and Denmark is under German occupation. On the rocky coast of Denmark, two brothers, Harald and Arne Olufsen, starkly different in nature, are straining against the rigid confines imposed by their austere, elderly parents and trying to find their own way in life. Meanwhile, a network of MI6 spies is attempting to decipher an encrypted Luftwaffe radio signal which mentions the new Freya-Gerät - a rudimentary form of German radar equipment.

Throughout these books, Follett has followed the fortunes of five intertwined families - American, German, Russian, English, and Welsh - as they make their way through the twentieth century. Now they come to one of the most tumultuous eras of all: the enormous social, political, and economic turmoil of the 1960s through the 1980s, from civil rights, assassinations, mass political movements and Vietnam to the Berlin Wall, the Cuban Missile Crisis, presidential impeachment, revolution - and rock and roll.

It is 997 CE, the end of the Dark Ages. England is facing attacks from the Welsh in the west and the Vikings in the east. Those in power bend justice according to their will, regardless of ordinary people and often in conflict with the king. Without a clear rule of law, chaos reigns. In these turbulent times, three characters find their lives intertwined.

In 1989 Ken Follett astonished the literary world with The Pillars of the Earth, set in 12th-century England. Readers and listeners ever since have hoped for a sequel. At last, here it is. Although the two novels may be listened to in any order, World Without End also takes place in Kingsbridge, two centuries after the townspeople finished building their exquisite Gothic cathedral. The cathedral is again at the center of a web of love and hate, greed and pride, ambition and revenge.

Picking up where Fall of Giants, the first novel in the extraordinary Century Trilogy, left off, Winter of the World follows its five interrelated families - American, German, Russian, English, and Welsh - through a time of enormous social, political, and economic turmoil, beginning with the rise of the Third Reich, through the great dramas of World War II, and into the beginning of the long Cold War.

Seft, a talented flint miner, walks the Great Plain in the high summer heat, to witness the rituals that signal the start of a new year. Joia, Neen's sister, is a priestess with a vision and an unmatched ability to lead. As a child, she watches the Midsummer ceremony, enthralled, and dreams of a miraculous new monument, raised from the biggest stones in the world. But trouble is brewing among the hills and woodlands of the Great Plain.

Ken Follett's World Without End was a global phenomenon, a work of grand historical sweep beloved by millions of readers and acclaimed by critics. Fall of Giants is his magnificent new historical epic. The first novel in The Century Trilogy, it follows the fates of five interrelated families - American, German, Russian, English, and Welsh - as they move through the world-shaking dramas of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the struggle for women's suffrage.

In the midst of an interstellar war, Yun Tianming found himself on the front lines. Riddled with cancer, he chose to end his life, only to find himself flash frozen and launched into space where the Trisolaran First Fleet awaited. Captured and tortured beyond endurance for decades, Yun eventually succumbed to helping the aliens subjugate humanity in order to save Earth from complete destruction.

In Pimpology, star of the documentaries Pimps Up, Ho's Down and American Pimp and Annual Players Ball Mack of the Year winner Ken Ivy pulls a square's coat on the unwritten rules that took him from the ghetto streets to the executive suites. Ken's lessons will serve any person in any interaction. Whether at work, in relationships, or among friends, somebody's got to be on top. To be the one with the upper hand, you've got to have good game, and good game starts with knowing the rules.

Never is an extraordinary novel, full of heroines and villains, false prophets and elite warriors, jaded politicians and opportunistic revolutionaries. It brims with cautionary wisdom for our times, and delivers a visceral, heart-pounding story that transports listeners to the brink of the unimaginable.

The Pillars of the Earth tells the story of Philip, prior of Kingsbridge, a devout and resourceful monk driven to build the greatest Gothic cathedral the world has known...of Tom, the mason who becomes his architect - a man divided in his soul...of the beautiful, elusive Lady Aliena, haunted by a secret shame...and of a struggle between good and evil that will turn church against state, and brother against brother.

Eating is an indispensable human activity. As a result, whether we realize it or not, the drive to obtain food has been a major catalyst across all of history, from prehistoric times to the present. Epicure Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin said it best: "Gastronomy governs the whole life of man."

More than 40 years after it ended, the Vietnam War continues to haunt our country. We still argue over why we were there, whether we could have won, and who was right and wrong in their response to the conflict. When the war divided the country, it created deep political fault lines that continue to divide us today. Now, continuing in the tradition of their critically acclaimed collaborations, the authors draw on dozens and dozens of interviews in America and Vietnam to give us the perspectives of people involved at all levels of the war.

First came the development of the Personality Matrix Construct—PMC, transferring human consciousness into a machine. It changed the galaxy and the way wars were fought. Then something went wrong with PMCs and the Federation Wars toppled the galactic order. PMCs became a menace to be hunted and exterminated.