yNiga (FORTHCOMING)

By Glenn Diaz

Winner, 2024 Philippine National Book Award

Shortlisted, Fitzcarraldo & New Directions & Giramondo 2020 Novel Prize

Yñiga Calinauan’s quiet life is upended when a retired army general wanted for the murder of peasants and activists in the countryside is captured across the street from her house. Days later the neighborhood is burned to the ground in what some say is retaliation. With nowhere to go, she returns to M—, the small fishing town where she grew up and now hopes to regain the quiet life she has lost. But soon she discovers that the terror she thought she had escaped in the city is right on her trail, and she must face the “forest of history” that has long haunted her family.

PRAISE

‘Diaz, like all great novelists of history, knows that to disappear—and to be disappeared—is a political question as much as an existential one. This moving, remarkable novel—as dense, meditative and engrossing as the forests its characters are haunted by, and as dryly funny as the jokes we tell ourselves to survive—is as much a visceral, unforgettable journey into one woman’s fraught familial legacy of disappearance and resistance, as well as a deeply poignant meditation on nation-building itself—and its own fraught familial legacy of disappearance, and resistance.’ —Elaine Castillo, author of America Is Not the Heart and How to Read Now

‘Diaz’s fierce and articulate intellect dazzles in his very evocative and at times funny but most deadpan and wry prose. He has captured the often absurd and peculiar life in the Philippines with a fond but critical eye.’ —Asian Review of Book

‘As one of the country’s most engaging and versatile storytellers, Diaz amazes as no other can. Between the interlocking scenes of beauty and horror runs a magic that only Diaz can create out of thin air, subtle in some places, maniacal in others, yet every so mindful that the author must be in full control of the story. The way the author grabs hold of the political question and allow it to rankle and grow bitter slowly in the heart of the reader is a marvel of political storytelling.’ —citation for the Philippine National Book Award
‘Glenn Diaz sees corruption and its paradoxes embedded in a cultural dynamic perpetually at play between power and survival. With great depth of vision and masterful prose, he puts us in touch not only with imported violence but with a local resistance heroically determined to better its condition.’—Brian Castro, author of Chinese Postman

CONTRIBUTORS’ DETAILS

Glenn Diaz’s first novel The Quiet Ones (Ateneo Press) won the 2017 Palanca Grand Prize and the Philippine National Book Award and the Madrigal Gonzales First Book Award, and received praise from Gina Apostol: “The prose seduces, the story devastates: a postcolonial lyric brooding on our world’s capitalist nightmare. Glenn Diaz’s The Quiet Ones gives the Philippines a book it has been waiting for.” His second novel, Yñiga (Ateneo Press) won the 2024 Philippine National Book Award for Best Novel in English. Glenn Diaz is a recipient of fellowships and residencies in Bangalore, New York, and Jakarta, among others. Born and raised in Manila, he completed his PhD in 2021 at the University of Adelaide in South Australia. The first chapter of Yñiga was published in Johannesburg Review of Books and an extract in The Oxonian Review.

MORE INFORMATION

Publication date: 08 September 2026 (UK)
Extent: 262pp
Format: B-format paperback (198mm × 129mm)
Rights held: UK
ISBNs: 978-1-917126-05-2 (paperback) / 978-1-911284-86-4(ebook)
Price: £14.99 (paperback) / £7.99 (ebook)