Triptych

Budapest, 1956. In this darkest year in the modern history of Hungary, a national uprising against Soviet occupiers and their reign of terror is underway. Eleven year old Evike and her firebrand mother steal deep into battle zones in support of civilian freedom fighters armed only with primitive weapons and desperate courage against the heavy artillery of trained Russian troops. Taken in for interrogation by the secret police, little Evike spins a story to deflect attention from her mother's revolutionary activities. A story that will irrevocably alter a number of lives and reach its tentacles, thirty years later, into the life of Ildiko Palmay.

Chicago, 1986. Ildiko, 37, a librarian and ESL teacher, the American-born daughter of Hungarian refugees, is caught 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 and unexpectedly drawn back to her roots, first to the Hungarian neighborhood of her 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, uncovers a trail of secrets and betrayals that eventually intersect with the tangled knot of the mother-daughter participants in the Revolution--and she discovers the shocking truth about her mother's death.

Triptych is the suspenseful unfolding of two parallel stories of mother and daughter relationships forged in the brutalities of the 1956 Hungarian revolution. The Triptych is about survival, displacement, the corrosive power of secrets, and, ultimately, the healing power of forgiveness.

The author of LIPSTICK AND LIES and HOLLYWOOD BUZZ, WWII home front mysteries featuring the engaging WASP pilot Pucci Lewis and highly praised for their authenticity, Margit Liesche has appeared on PBS’ History Detectives program.

The child of Hungarian missionaries who settled in the U.S. after WWII following years of service in China, she grew up near Chicago and has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for nearly 40 years. Margit’s parents’ stories about their family’s experiences in 1956, told in dark, hushed conversations, filled an impressionable seven-year-old’s imagination. These along with Life magazine photographs of carnage in Budapest streets and a visit from an escaped freedom fighter, underpin her new novel, TRIPTYCH.

In recovery from a long career in marketing professional services, Margit now does what she loves: writing, tramping the glorious hills near her home, and frequenting the stacks at her favorite bookstores and libraries.