At 850 pages, the book looks formidable enough. And its subject matter is pretty weighty too. Fall of Giants, bestselling British author Ken Follett’s latest tome, is the first instalment of a trilogy through which he plans to narrate the history of the 20th century. Now isn’t that a daunting enterprise? “Very,” agrees Follett, a portly man with a shock of silver hair. “But look, I’m in my 60s. If I am going to do something ambitious, this is the time to do it.”

He is 61, to be exact. And he has never been short on ambition — nor, indeed, content to rest on his laurels. Ever since he wrote Eye of the Needle — a gripping thriller about a World War II German spy — in 1978, Follett has notched up one publishing sensation after another, straddling bestseller lists and selling a staggering number of books the world over.

Earlier this week, the writer was in India to promote Fall of Giants (incidentally, this is his first ever book tour in the country), and I caught up with him at the Oberoi Hotel in Delhi. It’s an impersonal setting — the business centre of a five star hotel — but Follett doesn’t seem to mind when I try and tease the “personal” out of him. A celebrity novelist who, along with his second wife Barbara, once belonged to the inner circle of the Labour Party led by Tony Blair, he deals with questions about his spat with the former British Prime Minister as deftly as he does with those about his writing craft.

So how does he keep his readers riveted to his exceedingly long books, I ask him. (Pillars of the Earth, his 1989 historical novel set in the Middle Ages, was another mammoth saga which went on to become a monster hit worldwide.) “Well, for me, it’s a lot to do with planning,” Follett says as he sips a cappuccino. “I spend a lot of time planning the book before I write Chapter 1. The reason is that in the finished article there is always something new happening in the story. So the reader thinks, ‘Oh! What now! What next!’ ”

But it’s no good having just an exciting story, he points out. “If you can create characters people will care about and give them a constantly developing story, then you’re there.”

Follett did not perfect this winning formula right at the outset, though. He wrote as many as 10 undistinguished thrillers before he hit the big time with Eye of the Needle. He had started writing fiction while he was working as a reporter at London’s Evening News. That’s because journalism seemed like a dead end to him. “After a few years I realised I was never going to be a big star as a journalist. And I wanted to be a star,” he says with candour. “It was in my personality.”

He began to write short stories and sent them to magazines. “But they never got published.” Then in 1974, when he heard that a colleague on the newspaper had written a thriller and got £200 for it from the publisher, he decided to write one too. He was in urgent need of some money to fix his car and that, he says, “definitely acted as the trigger”. He did manage to sell his first book, and several books thereafter — “all for £200 or £300”. But bestsellerdom was nowhere in sight yet.

Follett remembers walking into bookstores and seeing piles of a new book by Frederick Forsyth or Sidney Sheldon and “maybe two copies of my book somewhere at the back of the store. And I kept asking myself: what are they doing right? And where am I going wrong? So I was constantly trying to get better as a writer.”

He used pseudonyms for all his early books because, he says, his agent at the time advised him to do it. “Why, I asked her, and she said, ‘because some day you might want to write something better.’ Not very flattering,” he laughs. “But it turns out that she was right!” Eye of the Needle, which he published in his own name — because he knew it was “very, very good” — was followed by a string of successes such as Triple, The Key to Rebecca, The Man from St Petersburg, Lie Down with Lions, and so on. And Follett became a millionaire many times over.

Follett was never in any doubt that popular fiction, rather than the literary kind, was his métier. As a child he read all sorts of books — from Shakespeare’s plays to works by Margaret Drabble, an eminent literary author of the time. “But what appealed to me most were thrillers. I was 12 when I read Live and Let Die — the second James Bond book. And it blew me away. So I suppose I wanted to write the kind of books I enjoyed most.”

A psychologist could perhaps make something out of Follett’s fascination with exciting thrillers and the fact that he was brought up by strict, born-again Christian parents who frowned upon watching television or going to the movies. Originally from Cardiff, Wales, the family moved to London when Follett was 10. He went on to study philosophy at University College, London, and when he was just 18, got married to his girlfriend Mary, who had become pregnant.

“When you are 18 and you’ve got your girlfriend pregnant, it seems like a disaster,” he says, smiling. “But you know, it wasn’t a disaster at all. We were dirt poor, of course. But we were young, we loved our little baby, and it was fine!”

At university Follett became involved with student protests against the Vietnam War. “British kids of our generation — and even American kids — had been brought up to believe that we were the good guys. It was a shock to realise that we were on the wrong side of this war, that we were dropping bombs on desperately poor people,” he says.

By the time he graduated, he identified himself with the social democrats (“we were called wishy washy liberals in those days — all the really clever people of our generation were Marxists”, he says) and he joined the Journalists’ Union and the Labour Party.

Throughout the years that Follett was making his fame and fortune as a writer, he maintained his links with the Labour Party. But his involvement in politics got a real fillip after he married his second wife, Barbara, a party worker, in 1985. Soon, the couple became close to Tony Blair and his New Labour lieutenants. In fact, they were so much a part of orchestrating Labour’s image makeover as an electable party that the media began to use the word “folletted” to mean something that had been smartened up.

But the man who had once organised glittering fundraiser galas for New Labour fell out of favour with 10 Downing Street in the late 1990s. And Follett too became a vocal critic of the way Blair was running the party.

So what went wrong? “I’ve never been quite sure,” Follett replies. “I mean, you never know with Tony. Tony drops people and he never explains why. He is terrified of confrontations. It’s a funny thing for a politician...he hates a face to face.”

It was because of Blair’s animosity, says Follett, that his wife Barbara, three-time Labour MP from Stevenage, Hertfordshire, did not become a minister as early as she should have. “She became a minister in 2007 — 24 hours after Tony resigned,” he says.

For all the acrimony with Blair, Follett says he remains committed to Labour and its ideals. But isn’t he often called a “champagne socialist” — a dig at the fact that he leads an opulent lifestyle (he has homes in London, Stevenage and Antigua and quaffs expensive champagne most evenings) and yet espouses the cause of socialism?

The epithet doesn’t seem to bother Follett, though. And no, he doesn’t see a contradiction between his high life and his high ideals. “It doesn’t help anybody for me not to drink champagne,” he says cheerfully. “Besides, during the Thatcher years in the early 1980s, there was a suggestion that Labour was a party for losers, for the old or the disabled. Barbara and I were part of how we overcame that problem. We were successful — Barbara was this very attractive wife of a millionaire. We lived in Chelsea, we had nice parties. And the message was that Labour was for successful people too — if you join the Labour Party you don’t have to wear a hair shirt and stop having a good time!”

Since we are on the subject of champagnes, I quiz him about which ones he likes best. “Well, I do love French champagne —Krug Rosé, which is a pink champagne, and Delamotte Blanc de Blancs. I love Salon (a super premium bubbly) too. But I don’t always drink the most pricey stuff.”

When he is not pounding out voluminous page turners, Follett likes to spend time with his large family — he has two children from his first marriage, his wife has three from her previous marriages, and six grandchildren in all. He also plays bass guitar in a blues band occasionally.

Though Ian Fleming was a big early influence, Follett reads a lot of Edith Wharton now — probably because he writes fewer thrillers these days and more of sprawling, densely plotted sagas. And does he like any of the present day spy novelists? John Le Carré, for instance? “I find Le Carré a bit dull,” he replies. But he does like Frederick Forsyth. “After The Day of the Jackal no one could write thrillers in the old way. Freddie changed that forever,” he says with a laugh.

Someone comes and reminds me that my time with Follett is up. He has back-to- back interviews lined up today. I bid him goodbye. And Follett gets ready to meet his next interlocutor.