Yniga Calinauan’s quiet existence in Manila is upended when a biographer starts asking questions about her activist father who disappeared years earlier. Soon after, a former army general is arrested across the road from her home, and her neighborhood is burnt to the ground. With nowhere to go, Yniga returns to the small fishing town of her childhood. But the boundaries between her various lives are beginning to crumble. Set against a backdrop of political upheaval, Yniga is both a compulsive thriller and a literary treasure. Multi-award-winning author Glenn Diaz forms a complex portrait of a woman and a country haunted by a ‘forest of history’. This is a novel about the routine violence of state terror – and the possibility of everyday resistance.
