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Books & Books presents a virtual evening with M. Evelina Galang and Gina Apostol, acclaimed fiction writers of the Filipino Diaspora. Join them as they host a joint celebration of the publications of their works, Apostol’s novel La Tercera and Galang’s collection, When the Hibiscus Falls.

Seventeen stories traverse borderlines, mythic and real, in the lives of Filipino and Filipino American women and their ancestors.

Moving from small Philippine villages of the past to the hurricane-beaten coast of near-future Florida, When the Hibiscus Falls examines the triumphs and sorrows that connect generations of women. Daughters, sisters, mothers, aunties, cousins, and lolas commune with their ancestors and their descendants, mourning what is lost when an older generation dies, celebrating what is gained when we safeguard their legacy for those who come after us. Featuring figures familiar from M. Evelina Galang's other acclaimed and richly imagined novels and stories, When the Hibiscus Falls dwells within the complexity of family, community, and Filipino American identity. Each story is an offering, a bloom that unfurls its petals and holds space in the sun.

M. Evelina Galang is the author of a previous story collection, Her Wild American Self (1996), two novels, One Tribe (2006) and Angel De La Luna and the Fifth Glorious Mystery (2013), and the nonfiction book Lola's House: Filipino Women Living with War (2017). She edited the anthology Screaming Monkeys: Critiques of Asian American Images (2003). Galang directed the Creative Writing Program at the University of Miami from 2009-2019 and served as VONA Board President from 2018-2023. She lives in Miami.

In her first novel since Insurrecto, Gina Apostol assembles a vision of Philippine history from the 19th century to present day in the fragmented story of the Delgados, a family surviving across generations of colonization, catastrophe, and war.

Rosario, a Filipina novelist in New York City, has just learned of her mother’s death in the Philippines. Instead of rushing home, she puts off her return by embarking on a remote investigation into her family’s history and her mother’s supposed inheritance, a place called La Tercera, which may or may not exist. Rosario catalogs generations of Delgado family bequests and detritus: maps of uncertain purpose, rusted chicken coops, a secret journal, the words to songs sung at the family home during visits from Imelda Marcos.

Each life Rosario explores opens onto an array of other lives and raises a multitude of new questions. But as the search for La Tercera becomes increasingly labyrinthine, Rosario’s mother and the entire Delgado family emerge in all their dizzying complexity: traitors and heroes, reactionaries and revolutionaries. Meanwhile, another narrative takes shape—of the country’s erased history of exploitation and slaughter at the hands of American occupying forces.

La Tercera is Gina Apostol’s most ambitious, personal, and encompassing novel: a story about what seems impossible—capturing the truth of the past—and the terrible cost to a family, or a country, that fails to try.

Gina Apostol has written five novels. She won the 2022 Rome Prize to work on a novel-in-progress, The Treatment of Paz. Her forthcoming book, La Tercera, is out in May 2023. Publishers' Weekly named her last book, Insurrecto, one of the Ten Best Books of 2018. Gun Dealers' Daughter won the 2013 PEN/Open Book Award. Her first two books, Bibliolepsy and The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata, both won the Philippine National Book Award. She grew up in Tacloban, Leyte, in the Philippines and lives in New York City and western Massachusetts. She teaches at the Fieldston School in NYC.

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A Virtual Evening with M. Evelina Galang & Gina Apostol