The Man in the McIntosh Suit [Paperback]

A Filipino-American take on Depression-era noir featuring mistaken identities, speakeasies, and lost love.

The year is 1929 and Bobot is just another migrant worker in rural California. Or rather, a migrant worker with a law degree from the Philippines reduced to manual labor in America. Bobot, like so many other young Filipinos, finds himself bunking in the fields, picking fruit by day. When his cousin writes claiming to have spotted his estranged wife in nearby San Francisco, he swipes a co-workers favorite nightclub suit and heads to the big city to find her. What follows is classic noir with seedy dives, mouthy pool sharks, and obsession.

Rina Ayuyang indulges her passion for old Hollywood and elaborate movie musicals while exploring her immigrant roots in a playful and mysterious drama, creating something she never saw but always had hoped fora classic tale about people who looked just like her. The Man in the McIntosh Suit is a gripping, romantic, and psychological exploration of a fledgling community chasing the American dream in an unwelcoming society heightened by racial hostility and the bubbling undercurrent of the coming Great Depression.Ayuyang evokes the hardship and racism experienced by Filipino immigrants in this Depression-era noir, in which a migrant worker abandons the strawberry fields of rural California in search of his estranged wife in San Francisco. New York Times

A fast-paced thriller of a story combining history with heartbreak, Rina Ayuyangs graphic novel mixes Manong lore with an individuals dreams. Gina Apostol, Insurrecto

Tight, compelling, evocative, Rina Ayuyangs The Man in the McIntosh Suit transports us to a colonial-era Philippines and a California of migrant workers and hardscrabble opportunities, set to a soundtrack of loss and 1920s love songs. ShlÃ*