I really adore this book when I finished reading late last year and I read it again in the summer of this year. I bought this book because it won the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2008 and I thought, why not?. If it won the Man Asian Literary Award, I bet it is a good book. The book itself is rather written unconventionally, of which I mean, it is going to be a new experience if you are a book worm who have read many novels in the past. The book is basically a skilfully interwoven sets of stories about a Filipino who tried his best make change in his home country, through the books but committed suicide, a young man trying to retrace the writer's life, a child's experience in WW2, stories of the marshal law in the Philippines, love life, and a whole lot more. I really want more people to read this book to just roughly understand the underlying reason of the exodus of many Filipino-Canadians who now come to Canada to escape the economic upheavals, in a country that was once known as the "Pearl of the Orient Seas."