'Night over Water'
Author: Ken Follett
Published: Pan Books / 1991
Pages: 479
Ken Follett is one of the most prolific and successful writers of our time.
Born in 1949 in Cardiff, Wales, he is the author of thrillers and historical novels who has sold more than 195 million copies of his books.
His father, a taxi inspector and a Plymouth Brethren follower banned watching films and television for his children. Ken developed an early interest in reading.
When his family moved to London when he was 10, the young Ken devoured all the books in the children's section of the Kenton library and was then allowed to take out adult books.
In 1967, he was admitted to University College London where he studied philosophy and became active in centre-left politics.
He married in 1968 and after graduating in 1970 did a post-graduate course in journalism and began working as a trainee reporter for the South Wales Echo moving on to the Evening News.
He then moved to publishing and became deputy managing director of a small London publisher, Everest Books.
He began writing fiction during evenings and weekends as a hobby. Later, he said, he began writing books when he needed £200 to fix his car and heard that a fellow journalist had received a £200 advance for a thriller.
Success was gradual at first but the 1978 publication of Eye of the Needle became an international best-seller and sold over 10 million copies. This made him both wealthy and internationally famous.
Each of his subsequent novels has become a best-seller and a number have been adapted for the screen.
The latest score says he has published 46 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).
Wings of Eagles (1983) was the true story of how two of Ross Perot's employees were rescued from Iran during the 1979 revolution.
The next three novels, the book being reviewed today, Night over Water (1991), A Dangerous Fortune (1993) and A Place called Freedom (1995) were more historical than thrillers.
He then returned to the thriller genre with The Third Twin (1996), followed by The Hammer of Eden (1998), 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, 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.
Then there are the five volumes of the Kingsbridge series. A comprehensive account of the building of a civilisation as seen in the building of a cathedral: The Pillars of the Earth (1989) and its sequel World Without End (2007) which returns to Kingsbridge 157 years later focusing on the descendants of the characters of Pillars as their lives are devastated by the Black Death.
Then A Column of Fire (2017) which begins in 1558, the love story between Ned Willard and Margery Fitzgerald at a time when Europe turned against Elizabethan England.
The Evening and the Morning (2020) is a prequel to The Pillars of the Earth. Set in the decade around 1000 AD, the story concerns the gradual creation of the town of Kingsbridge and of the many people - priests, nobles, peasants, the enslaved - who were to play significant roles.
Finally, The Armour of Light (2023) is set in 1792, around the beginning of the Industrial Revolution - the invention of the Spinning Jenny in 1770, the Napoleonic wars and the economic transformation of Europe - the human cost of progress and the struggle to rebuild a fractured world.
Then there is the Century trilogy. Fall of Giants (2010) follows the fates of five interrelated families - Welsh, American, German, Russian and English - as they move through the world-shaking dramas of the First World War, the Russian Revolution and the struggle for women's suffrage.
Winter of the World (2012) picks up where the first book left off, the enormous social, political and economic turmoil, beginning with the rise of Nazi Germany, the Spanish Civil War and the great dramas of the Second World War, the explosions of atom bombs and the beginning of the Cold War.
The final novel of the trilogy, Edge of Eternity (2014) continues to follow the five families through the Cold War and the Civil Rights movements.
Now to the book being reviewed today. It's 1939 and war has been declared between Britain and Germany.
The first air passenger service between the USA and Europe was started by Pan American Airways in the summer of 1939 but it only lasted a few weeks after Hitler invaded Poland.
The plane, a Boeing B-314 was actually like a luxurious airship taking only 74 passengers plus crew but it could cross the Atlantic in just over a day instead of the week a ship would take.
With the war already declared but before the actual hostilities began, a motley collection of persons hurries to embark, each having a personal reason.
Top of the range, there was an English aristocrat with his family, a British Fascist who was afraid he would be arrested had he remained in Britain. But two of his children deeply disagree with him though they had to obey.
There was a man running after his wife who had run away with her lover.
And a woman director of a factory who discovered at the last minute that her co-director brother had run away and was planning to steal the company.
And the plane's main engineer had been told his wife had been kidnapped. There was something deeply wrong in this last flight.
The novel may not be one of Follett's best books but it makes entertaining reading.