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.

Ken Follett's change in direction

According to an article in The Book Standard:

Bestselling author of World Without End, Ken Follett, will write a new epic trilogy, called "The Century Trilogy," which will "focus on intense personal dramas set against the vast looming background of world-changing historical events" of the 20th Century. The series will follow a number of families and the three books will take place before and up to World War I, World War II and the Cold War.

Read the whole article here.