From the author of Ilustrado, winner of the Man Asian Literary Prize, comes an unflinching satire about power, corruption, sex, and all the other topics you were told never to discuss in polite company.First came the Sexy-Sexygate scandal. Then an impeachment trial. Finally, a battle royale for the presidency. At the center of this political typhoon is Vita Nova, the most famous movie star in the Phillippines and a former paramour of the country’s most powerful man. Now, for the first time ever, she bares herself completely in a tell-all memoir that puts the sensational in sensationalistic.The setting: a sweating, heaving country. The time: right now. The plot: a drug war rages, an assassin brandishes a pistol, a damsel rises from ashes to power, and a government teeters on the brink. Among the players: a dreamer who boxed and acted his way to the presidency, his Koran-toting nemesis in the senate, a horny bishop, a cowboy turned warlord, a poor little rich boy dying with his dynasty,
Ilustrado opens with Crispin Salvador, lion of Philippine letters, dead in the Hudson River. His young acolyte, Miguel, sets out to investigate the author’s suspicious death and the strange dis
WINNER OF THE 2008 MAN ASIAN LITERARY PRIZEA NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEARIt begins with a body. On a clear day in winter, the battered corpse of Crispin Salvador is pulled from
