Amanda, who works for an international agency in Bangkok, is writing to her daughter Risa, in Manila, in order to tell her the tales that her own mother has told her. The letters trace the family’s maternal line, from the first ancestor in the eighteenth century, down to Amanda herself in 1992. She hopes, thus, to make Risa accept her decision to return to the country, despite everything that seems wrong with it. Both historical novel and family saga, it covers five generations, told in the epistolary manner, but using email. The novel was awarded the Carlos Palanca Grand Prize for the Novel. The first edition was published in 1996, as part of the Philippine Writers Series, a collaboration between Likhaan: the UP Creative Writing Center and the UP Press. In 2008, it was recognized as a UP Press Centennial Publications title. The novel was one of the first UP Press titles to be converted into an e-book. This second edition contains a new preface by the author.