Reportage on Lovers: A Medley of Factual Romances, Happy or Tragical, Most of Which Made News


Quijano de Manila - 1977
    Plus the portrait of a hip chick from then Swinging London as she discourses indelicately on a most delicate topic: the Filipino as Lover.

We Hope for Better Things


Erin Bartels - 2019
    But when she loses her job after a botched investigation, she suddenly finds herself with nothing but time.At her great-aunt's 150-year-old farmhouse, Elizabeth uncovers a series of mysterious items, locked doors, and hidden graves. As she searches for answers to the riddles around her, the remarkable stories of two women who lived in this very house emerge as testaments to love, resilience, and courage in the face of war, racism, and misunderstanding. And as Elizabeth soon discovers, the past is never as past as we might like to think.Debut novelist Erin Bartels takes readers on an emotional journey through time--from the volatile streets of 1960s Detroit to the Underground Railroad during the Civil War--to uncover the past, confront the seeds of hatred, and discover where love goes to hide.

High Rising


Angela Thirkell - 1933
    She also introduces us to specific characters as well as 'types' who will appear and reappear in changing relationships as the years go by. There is the middle-aged woman centrally involved in the events and activities around her; here, Laura Morland, a happily widowed author of very successful 'good bad books' (Thirkell herself?). A disappointed suitor and/or a brief, ill-conceived infatuation of younger man with older woman. At least two romances to work out—an older couple and a younger one—with mild crises along the way. A closing of ranks among the women vs the intruder nicknamed 'the Incubus' resolves both affairs to the satisfaction of all. Especially delightful are the children, servants and other retainers; well defined characters in their own right; from motor-mouthed young Tony Morland and his model railways to housekeeper Stoker and her grapevine among the servants of the neighbourhood.

Soledad's Sister


José Y. Dalisay Jr. - 2007
    Cabahug" - one of over 600 overseas Filipino workers who return as corpses to this airport every year. The real Aurora, however, is very much alive, a karaoke-bar singer in the distant town of Paez; the woman in the box must be her sister Soledad who used Rory's identity to secure a job in Saudi Arabia. No one knows for sure how this woman died; the body bears signs of foul play and abuse, and now waits to be claimed at the airport.A Paez policeman, Walter, is assigned to drive out to Manila to pick up the body, accompanied by Rory. Both Walter and Rory, who vaguely know each other, find their own lives redefined by the sudden return of the dead: Walter has been left by his wife and son for a new life in England; Rory feels herself standing on the brink of great prospects, ambitions that her sister never achieved. Somewhere on its long way home, the body gets stolen, and things get even more confused than ever.

Banana Heart Summer


Merlinda Bobis - 2005
    Richly imagined, gloriously written, Banana Heart Summer is an incandescent tale of food, family, and longing—at once a love letter to mothers and daughters and a lively celebration of friendship and community. Twelve-year-old Nenita is hungry for everything: food, love, life. Growing up with five sisters and brothers, she searches for happiness in the magical smell of the deep-frying bananas of Nana Dora, who first tells Nenita the myth of the banana heart; in the tantalizing scent of Manolito, the heartthrob of Nenita and her friends; in the pungent aromas of the dishes she prepares for the most beautiful woman on Remedios Street. To Nenita, food is synonymous with love—the love she yearns to receive from her disappointed mother. But in this summer of broken hearts, new friendships, secrets, and discoveries, change will be as sudden and explosive as the monsoon that marks the end of the sweltering heat—and transforms Nenita’s young life in ways she could never imagine.

Super Panalo Sounds!


Lourd Ernest H. de Veyra - 2011
    This book takes us on the rough-and-tumble journey of the greatest band you never heard, a story of drugs, rock and roll, and the depths of the human soul. We witness both the exhilaration and the ravages wrought by the rock scene. Tracing Pinoy rock history while creating its own alternative mythos, where rock gods walk on water, bands record mythical albums and then vanish from the scene, and kids from Projects 2-3 can change the world with music, Super Panalo Sounds! is a mind-opening, mind-altering cautionary tale of how high and how low you can go when you’re rocking and rolling.

State of War


Ninotchka Rosca - 1988
    Adrian is rich, innocent, handsome—the son of a leading family; Anna has been widowed in the rebel struggle and was herself detained and tortured by the military; Eliza, the beautiful daughter of a courtesan, is now the object of the perverted desires of the depraved Colonel Amor, Anna's tormentor.As the heat of the carnival brio rises, so do intimations of revolution, for somewhere in the jungle the rebel leader Guevara is plotting a terrorist act: a bomb will be placed at the speakers' stand timed to explode when the governor appears. Anna makes contact with the rebels, while Eliza plots to kill Amor for what he has done to her friend. And Adrian is captured and drugged by the colonel.As the tension builds, the novel moves back in time, in the Book of Numbers, on a headlong, magical, sometimes hallucinatory reprise of Filipino history and the history of the families of the three young people. We learn of the Japanese atrocities, Filipino greed and treachery, American coldness and venality. We learn how Adrian's fortune was made, how Anna became the strange and silent thinker she is, how Eliza is distantly related by European blood to Anna. And we meet characters whose literally fabulous—a woman who forces icons to respond prayers, a distillery owner who is also master of forty-two ways of self-indulgence, a self-contained maid who determines her master's fat, a boy who falls in love with saxophone, a teenage Chinese girl with bound feet who dreams of the return of the Manchu Dynasty, a German chemist unable to brew beer...Finally, in the Book of Revelations, we reawaken to the present: once again we are at the festival on K_____, about to witness the novel's shattering conclusion, its terrifying finale.Like Isabel Allende's The House of The Spirits, Ninotchka Rosca's novel is both a work of art and a powerful illumination of an entire culture and a country in conflict. Her achievement is timeless as well as masterful.

Tragic Theater


G.M. Coronel - 2009
    These supernatural beings were believed to be those of the victims from a fatal accident during its hasty construction. Unknown to them, something had long ago taken sanctuary inside the building, feeding on the anger and misery of the victims' souls. They learned this secret too late and walked into a horrifying encounter. This book was adapted into a major motion picture in the Philippines.

Dogeaters


Jessica Hagedorn - 1990
    It is a world in which American pop culture and local Filipino tradition mix flamboyantly, and gossip, storytelling, and extravagant behavior thrive.A wildly disparate group of characters--from movie stars to waiters, from a young junkie to the richest man in the Philippines--becomes caught up in a spiral of events culminating in a beauty pageant, a film festival, and an assassination. In the center of this maelstrom is Rio, a feisty schoolgirl who will grow up to live in America and look back with longing on the land of her youth.

Holy Fools


Joanne Harris - 2003
    Five years later the past has found her and to protect herself and her beloved child she'll have to perform one last act of dazzling daring more audacious than any she has previously attempted.With her internationally bestselling novels Chocolat, Blackberry Wine, Five Quarters of the Orange, and Coastliners, Joanne Harris has woven intoxicating spells that celebrate the sensuous while exposing the passion, secrets and folly beneath the surface of rustic village life. In Holy Fools, her most ambitious and accomplished novel to date, she transports us back to a time of intrigue and turmoil, of deception and masquerade. In the year 1605, a young widow, pregnant and alone, seeks sanctuary at the small Abbey of Sainte Marie-de-la-mer on the island of Noirs Moustiers off the Brittany coast. After the birth of her daughter, she takes up the veil, and a new name, Soeur Auguste. But the peace she has found in remote isolation is shattered five years later by the events that follow the death of her kind benefactress, the Reverend Mother. When a new abbess -- the daughter of a corrupt noble family elevated by the murder of King Henri IV -- arrives at Sainte Marie-de-la-mer, she does not arrive alone. With her is her personal confessor and spiritual guide, Père Colombin, a man Soeur Auguste knows all too well. For the newcomer is Guy LeMerle, a charlatan and seducer now masquerading as a priest, and the one man she fears more than any other. Soeur Auguste has a secret. Once she was l'Ailée, "The Winged One," star performer of a troupe led by LeMerle, before betrayal forced her to change her identity. But now the past has found her. Before long, thanks to LeMerle, suspicion and debauchery are breeding like a plague within the convent's walls -- fueled by dark rumors of witchcraft, part of the false priest's brilliantly orchestrated scheme of revenge. To protect herself and her beloved child, l'Ailée will have to perform one last act of dazzling daring more audacious than any she has previously attempted.

Pushing Ice


Alastair Reynolds - 2005
    Bella Lind and the crew of her nuclearpowered ship, the Rockhopper, push ice. They mine comets. But when Janus, one of Saturn's ice moons, inexplicably leaves its natural orbit and heads out of the solar system at high speed, Bella is ordered to shadow it for the few vital days before it falls forever out of reach. In accepting this mission she sets her ship and her crew on a collision course with destiny-for Janus has many surprises in store, and not all of them are welcome...

The Two Dead Girls


Stephen King - 1996
    No one understood their brutal deaths, not even the man who killed them. But John Coffey is about to gain a new insight, about his life in prison, and about the one man who will walk him down that green mile . . . toward destiny.Prepare yourself for Stephen King's boldest exercise in nerve-twisting suspense. A multi-part serial novel that begins on death row and goes on from there to realms of revelation that make death seem sweet. This is Stephen King's most irresistible journey ever. To be continued . . . --back cover

A Life Intercepted


Charles Martin - 2014
    Married to his high school sweetheart and one of the winningest quarterbacks in the history of college football, he was the number one NFL draft pick. But on the night of the draft, he plummeted from the pinnacle of esteem. Falsely accused of a heinous crime with irrefutable evidence, it seemed in an instant all was lost -- his reputation, his career, his freedom, and most devastatingly, the love of his life. Having served his sentence and never played a down of professional football, Matthew leaves prison with one goal -- to find his wife, Audrey, whom no one has seen since the trial. He returns to an unwelcoming reception from his Gardi, Georgia, hometown to learn that Audrey has taken shelter from the media with the nuns at a Catholic school. There she has discovered a young man with the talent to achieve the football career Matthew should have had. All he needs is the right coach. Although helping the boy means Matthew violates the conditions of his release and -- if discovered -- reincarceration for life, he'll take the chance with hope of winning back Audrey's love.

Cruel Beautiful World


Caroline Leavitt - 2016
    It's 1969, and sixteen-year-old Lucy is about to run away with a much older man to live off the grid in rural Pennsylvania, a rash act that will have vicious repercussions for both her and her older sister, Charlotte. As Lucy's default caretaker for most of their lives, Charlotte's youth has been marked by the burden of responsibility, but never more so than when Lucy's dream of a rural paradise turns into a nightmare.Cruel Beautiful World examines the intricate, infinitesimal distance between seduction and love, loyalty and duty, and explores what happens when you're responsible for things you cannot make right.

White Bird in a Blizzard


Laura Kasischke - 1999
    But in dreams that become too real to ignore, she's haunted by her mother's cries for help.Finally, she must act on her instinct that something violent and evil has occurred - a realization that brings Kat to a chilling discovery.