Ilustrado A Novel [Paperback]

WINNER OF THE 2008 MAN ASIAN LITERARY PRIZE
ANEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEWNOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR

It begins with a body. On a clear day in winter, the battered corpse of Crispin Salvador is pulled from the Hudson River. Gone, too, is the only manuscript of his final book, a work meant to rescue him from obscurity by exposing the crimes of the Filipino ruling families. Miguel, his student and only remaining friend, sets out for Manila to investigate.

The result is a rich and dramatic family saga of four generations, tracing one hundred and fifty years of Philippine history forged under the Spanish, the Americans, and the Filipinos themselves. Exuberant and wise, wildly funny and deeply moving,Ilustradois a daring and inventive debut novel that begins as a murder mystery and develops into an ambitious exploration of cultural identity, ambition, and artistic purpose. (The NewYorker).

Miguel Syjucoreceived the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize and the Philippines' highest literary honor, the Palanca Award, for the unpublished manuscript ofIlustrado. Born and raised in Manila, he currently lives in Montreal.

Winner of the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize while still in manuscript form, Ilustrado is a hip and secure first novel about the urgency of art and regret. Confident and quirky, with passages that recall early Phillip Roth and a structure not unlike the best M. Night Shyamalan films, the book actively seeks to provoke its audience with bathroom humor and sexist stabs at superficial melodrama. Such scenes are bookended by passages of profundity that somehow manage to always say something about life as well as literature. Roberto Ontiveros,The Dallas Morning News

Ambitious . . . In a daring literary performance, Syjuco weaves the invented with the factual . . .Ilustradois being presented as a tracing of 150 years of Philippine history, but it's considerably more than that . . . SlCi