Book excerpt: Ever since the publication of Battle Cry more than thirty years ago, Leon Uris has continued to write bestselling novels. Each displays all of the author's skill, for he is a writer at his best when the subject seems almost too big to handle. One of the most popular storytellers of the twentieth century, more than 5,500,000 copies of his novels have been sold in Corgi alone. In Trinity, he writes passionately about the tragedy of Ireland - from the famine of the 1840s to the Easter Rising of 1916, a powerful and stirring novel about the loves and hates, the defeats and triumphs of three families - a terrible and beautiful drama spanning more than half a century.