La Tercera
Soho Press May 2023
order here
read the NYT review here
An Editors’ Choice of the New York Times
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 Delgado, a Filipina novelist in New York City, learns of her mother’s death in the Philippines. Instead of rushing home, she puts off her return by embarking on an 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 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 a multitude of other lives and raises a multitude of 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 the near impossibility of capturing the truth of the past, and the terrible cost to a family, or a country, that fails to try.
“Profoundly rewarding, opening up a glorious new understanding of a country and a culture…”
Hari Kunzru in the New York Times
"To be Filipino, Gina Apostol writes, is to be a person under translation. Her ambitious project, at once relentlessly intellectual and dizzyingly slapstick, brings together two currents that usually never mix: the political project of anti-imperialism and the formal play of Borges, French theory, and postmodern fiction. What makes La Tercera so special is how it compresses these obsessions into a moving story of a novelist trying to understand her recently passed mother. It’s her most personal and accessible novel yet."—
Ken Chen, author of Juvenilia
“A feat of lavish storytelling, La Tercera reinvents the family epic to surface political exigencies and shadow histories with Apostol’s signature linguistic mischief, madcap humor, and earthy intelligence. This novel flashes with prismatic light.”—
Tracy O’Neill, author of Quotients
“Stylish, meta-fictional, intelligent, kaleidoscopic, melodramatic, multi-generational, spiked with twisted Filipino puns and double entendres, and containing a book within a book within a book (because we never get just one book from an Apostol novel but two, sometimes three), La Tercera is a love letter from a daughter to her mother, and an urgent act of remembering that salvages the truth (or its remains) from the regimes that pursue its erasure.” —
R. Zamora Linmark, author of Leche