Yñiga

Winner of a Philippine National Book Award

‘Yñiga is not just a novel; it is an echo of people, of families, who, generation after generation, confront the relentless cycle of political violence.’ Eka Kurniawan

Yñiga 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, Yñiga 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, Yñiga 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.

‘Ambitious and intriguing … rewards the attention it demands.’ James Ley, Australian Review of Books

‘Diaz’s fierce and articulate intellect dazzles in his very evocative and at times funny but mostly deadpan and wry prose. He has captured the often absurd and peculiar life in the Philippines with a fond but critical eye.’ Asian Review of Books

‘This moving, remarkable novel is as much a visceral, unforgettable journey into one woman’s fraught familial legacy of disappearance and resistance, as well as a deeply poignant meditation on nation-building itself.’ Elaine Castillo

‘Diaz detonates the explosive history of the Philippines in a maximalist political thriller peppered with the shrapnel of satire.’ – The Age

Glenn Diaz is the author of the novels The Quiet Ones and Yñiga, both winners of the Philippine National Book Award, and When the World Ended I Was Thinking about the Forest. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Rosa Mercedes, Liminal, The Johannesburg Review of Books, Splinter and others. Born and raised in Manila, he holds a PhD from the University of Adelaide and currently teaches with the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of the Philippines Diliman.

If you enjoyed Yñiga, we suggest:

• Immersing yourself in classics of resistance like The Captive Mind by Czeslaw Milosz, Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell and How to Spot a Fascist by Umberto Eco – not to mention Scared Angry Laughing by Margaret Merrilees

• Finding out more about the US strategy in the Philippines with Counter-Guerrilla Operations: The Philippine Experience, by Napolean D. Valeriano

• Just here for the cat? You need Breakfast at Tiffany's (Capote’s book or the film will do) or Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

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