But before Meg can take her first steps into the unknown alone, she must look to her past. Why, she wonders, did her mother wear a wedding ring but never marry? Why, for instance, does the tallyman never call at No. 3 Tippet's Yard to collect any rent? He does everywhere else. With Ma gone, Meg must go back to her roots to uncover her 'family tree'. However, the process of simplfying her life leads to unforseen complications. But there's always Kip, reliable and loving, to pick up the pieces of her unsolved life and love.

    Out of her rich imagination she drew forth tales of bold princesses and cowardly kings, spurned suitors and ardent lovers, fearless young men and heartless queens. Every conceivable place of enchantment was Lola Basyang’s domain.The First “Kuwento ni Lola Basyang “ appeared in the Tagalog magazine Liwayway in 1925. Its author, Severino Reyes, was the founder and editor of Liwayway as well as a pioneering figure in Tagalog theater. Mr. Reyes wrote more that 400 stories under the pen name Lola Basyang.Tahanan Books has gathered together a literary dream team to produce this landmark collection of twelve tales. Poet and literary critic Bienvenido Lumbera sifted through hundreds of manuscripts to select the best of Reyes’ tales. Acclaimed author and publisher Gilda Cordero-Fernando delivered the original English translation and renowned children’s book illustrator Albert Gamos rendered over 30 unforgettable illustrations.Tahanan’s anthology introduces Lola Basyang to a new generation of readers in English. Open this book, sit at her feet, and let the magic begin.

    Here are exiles, emigrants, and wanderers uprooting their families from the Philippines to begin new lives in the Middle East, the United States, and elsewhere—and, sometimes, turning back again. A pharmacist living in New York smuggles drugs to his ailing father in Manila, only to discover alarming truths about his family and his past. In Bahrain, a Filipina teacher drawn to a special pupil finds, to her surprise, that she is questioning her own marriage. A college student leans on her brother, a laborer in Saudi Arabia, to support her writing ambitions, without realizing that his is the life truly made for fiction. And in the title story, a journalist and a nurse face an unspeakable trauma amidst the political turmoil of the Philippines in the 1970s and ’80s.In the Country speaks to the heart of everyone who has ever searched for a place to call home. From teachers to housemaids, from mothers to sons, Alvar’s powerful debut collection explores the universal experiences of loss, displacement, and the longing to connect across borders both real and imagined. Deeply compassionate and richly felt, In the Country marks the emergence of a formidable new writer.

    The fall of Malaya and Singapore and the bombing of Darwin—what looked like the invasion of Australia—ebb and crash over a man’s long search to find a home and a woman’s determination to keep hers, connected by old memories and new betrayals. It is a thriller and a romance, a story of earth and water, air and metal—an unforgettable ride through the most precarious time in our region's recent history. Garry Disher writes: ‘Past the Headlands came from the same World War 2 research as The Stencil Man. I was struck by the power of two documents. The first was a letter written by a woman alone on a cattle station near Broome in 1942, at the time the Japanese were overrunning Malaya and Singapore and bombing areas of northern Australia. One day she found herself giving shelter to Dutch colonial officers and their families, who were fleeing Sumatra and Java ahead of the Japanese advance (many people like them lost their lives when Japanese planes shot up their waiting seaplanes in Broome Harbour in March, 1942). This woman stuck in my head (the isolation, the danger, the efforts to communicate, her bravery, etc). The second document was a war diary written by an Australian army surgeon who escaped Singapore ahead of the Japanese and was stuck in Sumatra, trying to get out. Here he treated many of the civilians (and Australian Army deserters) fleeing from Singapore. He was captured by the Japanese, but survived the war. But his last few diary entries detail how he and a mate were waiting for a plane or a ship to take them out, then one day he wrote, “Davis [his mate] left last night without telling me”. So much for mateship. I spent years trying to find my way into their stories. At one stage I spent a year writing 40,000 words before realising it wouldn’t work. I put it aside, then realised one subplot didn’t belong, so extracted it and turned it into a separate novel The Divine Wind, which has sold 100,000 copies around the world, won a major award and been published as both a young adult and a general market novel. But cutting it out like that freed me up to write about the woman and the man betrayed by his mate, in Past the Headlands.’

    and the Florida Crackers -the zany but lovable folks who populated the remote hamlet that was Marjorie Rawlings’ home. With a gift for humor and a venerable ear for dialect comes the author’s personal accounts of the people, scenery and wildlife of Cross Creek.Short Stories:A Crop Of BeansBenny and the Bird DogsJacob’s LadderThe PardonVarmintsThe EnemyGal Young UnAlligatorsA Plumb Clare ConscienceA Mother In MannvilleCocks Must Crow

    Hau, Writer and literary critic

    More than the individual story of a mother watching her sons grow and plunge into real life, Dekada '70 is an indictment of martial law, and here, Lualhati minces no worlds." - Female Forum, November 21, 1983

    Marks the seasons of the author's life, her early writing, her work as active media practitioner, and her religio-spiritual writing.

    When it won the Carlos Palanca Grand Prize for the English Novel in 1999, it proved that fiction can be both popular and literary.F.H. Batacan has a degree in Broadcast Communication and a master's degree in Art Studies, both from the University of the Philippines in Diliman. She has worked as a policy researcher, broadcast journalist, web designer, and musician, and is currently a journalist based in Singapore. She previously won a prize for her short story "Door 59" in the 1997 Palanca awards, and her work has appeared in local magazines, as well as in the online literary magazine Web del Sol.

    Every legend hides a lieA murdered Skygodre-emerges in modern-day Manila.A Tikbalang prince plots vengeancefor the death of his father.And the Queen of the Asuangunleashes the mythical Bakunawaupon the streets of the city.Caught in their age-old struggle is Andoy.a crippled orphan that discovershe is the fulfillment of a prophecydating back to Lapu-Lapu himself

    With Dream Jungle, she achieves a new level of narrative daring.Set in a Philippines of desperate beauty and rank corruption, Dream Jungle feverishly traces the consequences of two seemingly unrelated events: the discovery of an alleged lost tribe and the arrival of a celebrity-studded American film crew filming an epic Vietnam War movie. Caught in the turmoil unleashed by these two incidents are four unforgettable characters--a wealthy, iconoclastic playboy, a woman ensnared in the sex industry, a Filipino-American writer, and a jaded actor--who find themselves drawn irrevocably together in this lavish, sensual portrait of a nation in crisis.

    Slightly against his better judgement he took them in, fed them cocoa, and put them to sleep in his bed. A few days later he found that - somehow - he had become the unofficial guardian of Horace and Ethel. It was him, the orphanage, or separation for the gutsy little pair who would have to be farmed out to anyone who would take them, and Jim felt a sudden affinity for the two cheeky cockney kids. The first thing he had to do was find fresh lodgings for them all.Miss Rebecca Pilgrim was a woman of strict Victorian principles, eminently respectable, and determined to keep her privacy intact. She had reckoned without her new lodgers - Horace, Ethel and, above all, the irrepressible Jim Cooper. And thus began the humanizing of Miss Pilgrim, who turned out to be younger, prettier, and far gentler than any of them had suspected.

    for Aditya is the boy from Pataliputra, the boy who was once a reckless and carefree aristocrat, but who has now been forced to become a man with a purpose to fight for honour and love.With a sweeping narrative and interesting everyday characters like the smelly old dhaba owner Tanku, Philotas the unlucky Greek soldier, the no-nonsense medical student Radha, Pandi the hard drinking mercenary and the lovely Devika, the Boy from Pataliputra is the mesmerizing story of a young man’s growth to maturity, but also, equally, a story about the rise of a nation.

    How did he allow the other person to die? How did he help the other person to hang himself to death? He was terribly upset about this. The moment his eyes saw a rope in any form he used to remember everything.........

    The end of his journey turns out to be the beginning of an odyssey in his beloved city where he finds "an insidious lawlessness creeping upon the land."Set in Manila in the last beleaguered months before the politico-military takeover in 1972, Bamboo in the Wind tells of the last desperate efforts of a people fighting to stave off disaster. Amid the escalating madness of a regime gone berserk, an odd assortment of people—a senator, a young nationalist, a dispossessed farmer, a radical activist, a convent school girl, a Jesuit scholastic—make their way along the labyrinthine corridors of greed and power. Each is forced to examine his own commitment in the face of brutality and evil, as the book conjures up scene after scene of devastation: the massacre of the demonstrators, the demolition of Sapang Bato, the murder of the sugar plantation workers, the burning of the Laguardia rice fields. And, as a climax to the mounting violence, that final September day—the arrests, the torture, and finally, the darkness that overtakes the land.