La Tercera

Written by Gina Apostol

Narrated by Jensen Olaya

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Highbridge Company
• Release date: May 2, 2023
• ISBN: 9781696611169

Gina Apostol

 Gina Apostol’s third book,  Gun Dealers’ Daughter , won the 2013 PEN/Open Book Award and was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize. Her first two novels,  Bibliolepsy  and  The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata , both won the Juan Laya Prize for the Novel (Philippine National Book Award). Her essays and stories have appeared in the  New York Times ,  Los Angeles Review of Books ,  Foreign Policy ,  Gettysburg Review  and  Massachusetts Review . She lives in New York City and western Massachusetts and grew up in Tacloban, Philippines. She teaches at the Fieldston School in New York City.