Gina Apostol

A Pilipino woman living in New York City recounts her youthful indiscretions as a university student in Manila whose boyfriend turned her into a communist rebel and the fatal act she committed that haunts her to this day. 13,000 first printing.

A Novel

Gun Dealers' Daughter

He was there in the screen. I cowered miserably before it. God spoke English with an accent. I didn’t speak. I looked God wanly in the eye and didn’t blink. My sobs echoed in the chapel, and God in hiding had nothing to say.

When a body is missing in a city like Manila, there are known avenues of retrieval. Countryside sections of the southern coastline, jungle areas near the North Luzon Expressway, goat-ridden ramparts off of busy decrepit roads. In the old days, they might have been havens for native bandits, escapees from the polo, or righteous tax-evaders: now they were spaces forsaken by townspeople and forgotten by law. Nature is not the least subversive of the elements in the countryside. Lastly, of course, there is the accommodating river Pasig, so intimate with death as it weaves through the miserable, littoral municipalities of Metro Manila that it holds sway in our dreams: the last witness of the ever-loyal city’s grief.

Gun Dealers' Daughter A Novel

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