He hoped it would be small enough to kill at least that would make a change from rabbit for dinner. He edged toward the noise cautiously the scream had now turned to a whine, but it still did not sound like any animal he knew. He had never known any animal to scream in quite that way before. He turned suddenly, sensing the possible danger, his eyes searching for an animal that was so obviously in pain. The young boy who was hunting rabbits in the forest was not sure whether it was the woman’s last cry or the child’s first that alerted his youthful ears. She only stopped screaming when she died. Too many coincidences moved the plot, too many misunderstandings and pettiness factored into their enmity and the resolution was too cliched. My problems with the books began when their lives began to intersect.

Meanwhile Abel comes into his inheritance, learning he's his father's son even as he loses everything to the Russians in the wake of World War I and emigrating to the United States with only a few dollars coming off the boat. We watch self-contained William shrewdly build on his fortune, making his own money buying and selling matchbox cars to his classmates, building a stockmarket portfolio while still a schoolboy, and struggling against his feckless stepfather. Both prove themselves at first both extraordinary and sympathetic. We follow their parallel but contrasting from boyhood. William Kane Lowell, a Boston Brahmin and Abel Rosnovski, the illegitimate son of a Polish baron.

The story follows two men born on the same day in 1906. One of those sagas where you enjoy a panorama of history and watching two powerful characters clashing. It was clear from the start that this wasn't great literature by any means-but for the first part of around 200 pages I found it gripping.

Kane and abel archer