Though her father’s health is dire, Flora, Gil’s youngest, can’t help but be consumed by the thought that her mother, Ingrid-who went missing and presumably drowned (though the body was never found) off the coast more than a decade ago-could be alive, wandering the streets of their town. As soon as they hear word of his accident, Gil’s grown daughters, Nan and Flora, drop everything and return to their seaside family home in Spanish Green. When famous author Gil Coleman sees “his dead wife standing on the pavement below” from a bookshop window in a small town on the southern coast of England, he follows her, but to no avail, and takes a near-fatal fall off a walkway on the beach. Be it admitted, he keeps his story sturdily self-perpetuating without interrupting its continuity by so much as having to change the ribbon on his typewriter.Ī forsaken family bound by grief still struggles to pick up the pieces 12 years after their mother’s death.

Out of both fact and fiction, spackled with innumerable 'Jaysuses' and 'Hail Maws,' Uris surely will once again achieve that state of grace where doing good is tantamount to doing well. But he will fall in love with a Scots-Presbyterian girl, an unthinkable liaison in terms of politics and the Church, just as Jeremy Hubble's love for a girl called Molly Rafferty can never be sanctioned. Prominent here, not really by virtue of characterization, is Conor Larkin, a crofty whose 'hungering to read' leads to considerable knowledge if never enough to escape his Bogside beginnings then there are the Hubbles and Weeds, affiliated by wealth, their British backgrounds, and marriage, eventually unto Roger Hubble, political major-domo of western Ulster and his 'smashing' wife Caroline who can't help but notice the attractive Conor. Uris' persistently researched and reconstituted history goes even further back with 18th century insets and the potato famine and Parnell and, and, and. With his usual partisan magnanimity, Uris devotes himself to another popular/unpopular lost cause, the Irish, and in particular the Fenian struggle which extended from the mid 19th century to the Easter Monday Uprising of 1916 in all its 'Terrible Beauty.' The Trinity of the title, according to the publishers, refers to three families (only two are around for most of the book) but surely must be the past, present and future which keeps repeating itself inexorably through the years.

Leon uris trinity 1976