At Home with Literati: Gina Apostol & Ligaya Mishan

Literati bookstore is pleased to welcome Gina Apostol to our At Home with Literati Series in support of La Tercera. She will be joined in conversation bt Ligaya Mishan.

Click here to join the webinar event on 5/8. No pre-registration required!

Note: Literati bookstore is now hosting on Zoom webinars. You will be prompted to enter a first name and email upon joining. You may then see a window reading “waiting for host to start webinar,” but sit tight–you will be admitted as soon as we begin broadcasting live! You will be able to submit questions using the Q&A feature.

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 is the author of the novels Insurrecto, Gun Dealers’ Daughter, Bibliolepsy, and The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata. She is the winner of two Philippine National Book Awards, the PEN/Open Award, and the Rome Prize. She lives in New York City and western Massachusetts and grew up in Tacloban, Leyte, in the Philippines.

Ligaya Mishan writes for the New York Times and T magazine. She has won a James Beard Award and been a finalist for the National Magazine Awards, and her pieces have been selected for the Best American anthologies in Magazine, Food, and Travel Writing. She has written about books for The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and the Times Book Review. The daughter of a Filipino mother and a British father, she grew up in Honolulu, Hawai’i.