In the vein of Coetzee's Summertime or W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants, Trinity revisits the life of scientist Robert Oppenheimer as narrated by seven fictional characters who claim to have known him.

'Brilliant . . . Hall has shaped a richly imagined, tremendously moving fictional work. Its genius is not to explain but to embody the science and politics that shaped Oppenheimer's life . . .The resulting quantum portrait feels both true and dazzlingly unfamiliar' New York Times


J. Robert Oppenheimer - the father of the atomic bomb - was a brilliant scientist, a champion of liberal causes, and a complex and often contradictory character. In Louisa Hall's kaleidoscopic novel seven fictional characters bear witness to his life. From a secret service agent who tailed him in San Francisco, to the young lover of a colleague in Los Alamos, to a woman fleeing McCarthyism who knew him on St. John, as these men and women fall into the orbit of a brilliant but mercurial mind at work, all consider his complicated legacy while also uncovering deep and often unsettling truths about their own lives.


In Trinity, Louisa Hall has crafted an explosive story about what it means to truly know someone, and about the secrets we keep from the world and from ourselves.

'A striking portrait of a man who fathered the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and then went on to embrace liberal causes, lie about love affairs and lobby against nuclear proliferation' Mail on Sunday

'A splintered and intriguing portrait' Erica Wagner, Financial Times


'A brilliant imagining of how the details omitted from one notorious man's story might define him more fully than the broad strokes we already know . . . Trinity sounds a wake-up call' Time

A boldly imagined scenario that explores themes of guilt and betrayal.