Oprah chooses Ken Follett

From Publishers Lunch:

Oprah Taps Follett
Who needs a National Book Award when you're an Oprah pick? Yesterday Winfrey selected Ken Follett's 973-page THE PILLARS OF THE EARTH as her latest selection (as MJ Rose has noted, keeping her long streak of selecting books by men intact). In a statement Oprah said it's "like nothing I would ever read or had ever read before." A spokesman for NAL said they had shipped 612,000 copies to stores in advance of the announcement.