Triptych

Budapest, 1956. In the darkest year of Hungary's modernhistory, a national uprising against Soviet occupiers and their reign of terroris underway. Eleven-year-old Evike and her firebrand mother steal deep intobattle zones in support of civilian freedom fighters, armed only with primitiveweapons and desperate courage against the heavy artillery of trained Russiantroops. When taken in for interrogation by the secret police, little Evikespins a story to deflect attention from her mother's revolutionary activities-astory that will irrevocably alter many lives and reach its tentacles, thirtyyears later, into the life of Ildiko Palmay.Chicago, 1986. Ildiko is a thirty-seven-year-old librarianand ESL teacher, the American-born daughter of Hungarian refugees. She iscaught in a web of guilt and regret over her mother's mystifying death.Unsettled by her life and her romantic failures, she finds herself suddenly andunexpectedly drawn back to her roots-first to the Hungarian neighborhood ofher youth in Chicago, and eventually to the Russian-occupied city of Budapest.Along the way, she meets a magnetic man who may not be what he seems anduncovers a trail of secrets and betrayals that eventually intersects with thetangled knot of the mother-daughter participants in the revolution. Triptych is thesuspenseful unfolding of two parallel stories of mother and daughterrelationships forged in the brutalities of the 1956 Hungarian revolution-a taleabout the corrosive power of secrets and, ultimately, the healing power offorgiveness.