Франсиско Хосе: Dusk

With Dusk (originally published in the Philippines as Po-on), F. Sionil Jose begins his five-novel Rosales Saga, which the poet and critic Ricaredo Demetillo called «the first great Filipino novels written in English.» Set in the 1880s, Dusk records the exile of a tenant family from its village and the new life it attempts to make in the small town of Rosales. Here commences the epic tale of a family unwillingly thrown into the turmoil of history. But this is more than a historical novel, it is also the eternal story of man s tortured search for true faith and the larger meaning of existence. Jose has achieved a fiction of extraordinary scope and passion, a book as meaningful to Philippine literature as One Hundred Years of Solitude is to Latin American literature.

«The foremost Filipino novelist in English, his novels deserve a much wider readership than the Philippines can offer.»-Ian Buruma, New York Review of Books

«Tolstoy himself, not to mention Italo Svevo, would envy the author of this story.»-Chicago Tribune