La Tercera-Quality Guarantee

Description

In her first novel since Insurrecto, GinaApostol assembles a vision of Philippine history from the 19th centuryto present day in the fragmented story of the Delgados, a familysurviving across generations of colonization, catastrophe, and war.

Rosario, a Filipina novelist in New York City, has just learned ofher mother’s death in the Philippines. Instead of rushing home, she putsoff her return by embarking on a remote investigation into her family’shistory and her mother’s supposed inheritance, a place called LaTercera, which may or may not exist. Rosario catalogs generations ofDelgado family bequests and detritus: maps of uncertain purpose, rustedchicken coops, a secret journal, the words to songs sung at the familyhome during visits from Imelda Marcos.

Each lifeRosario explores opens onto an array of other lives and raises amultitude of new questions. But as the search for La Tercera becomesincreasingly labyrinthine, Rosario’s mother and the entire Delgadofamily emerge in all their dizzying complexity: traitors and heroes,reactionaries and revolutionaries. Meanwhile, another narrative takesshape—of the country’s erased history of exploitation and slaughter atthe hands of American occupying forces.

La Tercera is Gina Apostol’s most ambitious, personal, and encompassing novel: astory about what seems impossible—capturing the truth of the past—andthe terrible cost to a family, or a country, that fails to try.