ABOUT THE BOOK

Katrina Ballesteros de los Dolores is in her thirties, single, and stuck in a dead-end teaching job. An opportunity to work abroad and see the world seems like the answer, but it also means leaving her hometown of Iligan and what it stands for.

Two and a half centuries in the past, her Spanish ancestor Geronimo leaves home too—he runs afoul of fate, seeking his fortune in the Philippines and finding himself in the thick of the colonial wars in a distant presidio of Mindanao. His descendant, Josefina, is also fated to suffer in World War II, where she must wage a different kind of battle under the Japanese occupation.

As Katrina decides between the familiar and the unfamiliar, she must deal with the resonance of the choices made by those who came before her, caught between the contingencies of love and war and mourning for what has disappeared—ang nahanaw—even as she becomes someone who has the awareness of what can be saved—naa’y hanaw.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ana Margarita R. Nuñez has a BA in Communication Arts, an MFA in Creative Writing, and a PhD in Literature from De La Salle University, where she is currently teaching with the Department of Literature. Her short stories, essays, and screenplays have been published in Kritika Kultura, Likhaan Journal of Contemporary Philippine Literature, Philippines Free Press, and other local and regional publications. She was a fellow for fiction at the Silliman National Writers Workshop in 2009 and the University of the Philippines National Writers Workshop in 2023.

Her other interests include the visual arts, Mindanao culture, history, literature, and reading pedagogy in basic education. She was raised in Iligan City and is married, with two sons.