backcover text:
Dean Alfar's spirited first novel is about sorcery wrought by love, lust, and literature, by friendship, family and 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 wals 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 multigenerational and multinational cast of kith and kin, this audacious 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.

Ateneo de Manila University Press 2006, paperback, 159 pages