Dean Alfar's first novel is about the sorcery wrought by love lust and literature by friendship family and the Filipino nation. Salamanca streaks across decades and spaces tracking the stormy relationship between polymorphous-perverse Gaudencio Rivera whose passions ignite prodigious feats of writing and wandering and Palawena beauty Jacinta Cordova whose perfection transmutes walls into glass and adoration into art. Tracing the arc of an imperfect marriage sundered by acts of nature (not least human) and sutured by acts of will (not least nonhuman) and vividly peopled by a multigenerational and multinational cast of kith and kin this work of imagination takes the reader on a magical excursion into Philippine life and history while setting new standards for the Filipino novel along the way.
