Yñiga by Glenn Diaz

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.

‘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