ABOUT THE BOOK

A yet-unnamed girl walks through streets steeped in unheard histories. Traveling to the city alone to inform his father of his sister’s birth, a ten-year-old boy confronts injustice for the first time. A teenage girl makes a life-and-death decision for her delinquent brother. The father of a girl who survived the raging floods notices her unusual treatment of her prized rag doll. An unknown perpetrator threatens to release a local beauty queen’s nudes. The girl, now with a name, is recruited into an infamous white man’s home in a secluded old subdivision. In these ten stories, the so-called City of Golden Friendship is a space of progress and bliss tempered by decay and self-destruction.

Set at a time in the city’s history that will soon be known as pre-metropolitan, this short story cycle follows characters arriving or escaping into a migrant city peopled with hopeful settlers and souls harboring private terrors, amplified by their desire to be loved or to belong within a culture in constant waiting for the next fall from grace. At times bleak but at all turns grounded and vivid, The Fireline: Stories from Cagayan de Oro is an ode to a city ever in flux.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

NH LEGASPI is a fictionist, translator, and editorial worker from Cagayan de Oro City. She has a bachelor’s degree in English from Xavier University–Ateneo de Cagayan and a master’s degree in creative writing from the University of the Philippines Diliman. She is a former junior editor at the Ateneo de Manila University Press and currently a content editor at Cambridge University Press and Assessment. Her short fiction pieces have appeared in the Bulawan Literary Journal of Northern Mindanao, Tinubdan: New Voices from Northern Mindanao (2021), the Likhaan Journal of Contemporary Philippine Literature 17 (2023), and Kinaadman Journal 44 (2024). She received an F. Sionil Jose Young Writers Award in 2017 and was a participant at the third Saling Panitik: Bienvenido Lumbera Seminar-Workshop on Translation in 2022. She leads Bulawan Books, the publishing arm of the writers collective Nagkahiusang Magsusulat sa Cagayan de Oro (NAGMAC), and Papel-Papel, a publishing consultation start-up. She lives in CDO with her husband and their cat, Grushenka.