Kane & Abel

Kane and Abel is Jeffrey Archer's second novel, published in 1979, and it is built on two lives rather than one. William Lowell Kane is the heir to a Boston banking fortune and Abel Rosnovski is born in Poland and raised with nothing, and the two are born on the same day in 1906 without ever meeting as children.

Archer tells their stories in parallel through the First World War, the Depression and the Second World War, and each man's rise is shaped by decisions taken on the other side of the Atlantic. Kane inherits a bank and has to defend it; Abel reaches America with nothing, works his way through the hotel trade and eventually builds a chain of his own. The book gives each of them a case, so the reader is placed inside one man's justification and then the other's.

The rivalry becomes personal well before either of them knows the whole of it, and the plot turns on what each man believes the other has done. Archer continued the story with The Prodigal Daughter, which follows Kane's daughter Florentyna, and the two books together carry the family history across most of the twentieth century.