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.