The Orlando Trilogy contains Orlando King, Orlando at the Brazen Threshold, and Agatha, a family story of powerful people in the 1930's and their decline into the 1950's.
Orlando King is Isabel Colegate's retelling of the Oedipus story. Orlando is reared by his mother's tutor on an island off the coast of France. When he goes to England to make his fortune, he falls into the orbit of his biological father. He doesn't kill Leonard, but he is present when he dies and he does marry his stepmother. Colegate plays effectively with chronology in this novel: a choice that she does not continue in the other two, being content with the results of her first experiment.
Orlando at the Brazen Threshold takes Orlando, nearly blind (of course) and liable to die at any time with a bad heart, to Italy after he has backed the wrong side before England's entry into WWII. His daughter Agatha, 17, comes to live with him, and they forge a strong bond as they work to remodel the priest's house, tower, and chapel that Orlando has bought. Orlando's interior life is caught up in understanding the diaries of King, who brought him up. Agatha is bent on loving and doing her best for Orlando, for her favorite half-brother Paul, and for her cousin Henry with whom she has always been in love.
Agatha returns the action to England where Agatha and Henry live in a cottage on his father's land and Conrad, Henry's father, operates as a cabinet minister just out of the inner circle of power during the Suez crisis. This is a political novel, contrasting Conrad's loyalty to the faded empire with Paul's brash and self-aggrandizing communism.
The story is always compelling; the characters are fascinating without the vital spark that makes their triumphs and defeats of emotional importance to the reader - or this reader. Their final impersonality reinforces the feeling for the time, giving a solid finish to the trilogy. ( )

This trilogy tells the story of Orlando King, his rise to ambiguous power during the moral confusion of the 1930s, his spectacular downfall and the troubled legacy he bequeathed to his divided family. As the 1950s draw to a close, his daughter Agatha accomplishes a painful resolution.