Sarah Silvestre has always been the dependable one. That’s why everyone calls her ‘Steady Sarah’. She’s responsible, mature, organized, and has her life all planned out. Until one day, everything turns upside down: first, her longtime boyfriend, Pete, breaks up with her; then, she loses her job in a corporate downsize. What’s a girl to do? Pack her bags, of course. Sarah is on a quest for seven waterfalls all over the country, from Tanay, Rizal all the way to Lake Sebu, South Cotabato. Her family and her best friends, Anya and Benito, all think she’s crazy. But for once in her life, she’s excited to be the one running away. Benito, in particular, insists on going with her. Will this be the adventure of her life? Or is she just chasing a disaster waiting to happen?
Archives: Books
And For the Record
Author Yugel Losorata extracted salient points from his many years making music, being in a band, writing news and features, and keeping up with the euphoria and struggles of being a writer-musician in the Philippines. By way of narrative essays that jump from personal struggles to privileges while hobnobbing or being friends with celebrities, he crafted a true-to-life tale of a Filipino recording artist and performing musician who happens to be a rock journo, too.
On one hand, Losorata stumbled enough in his attempts to crack mainstream success. But in his own right, he tasted a bountiful of small wins amid the backdrop of Philippine showbiz rich in heritage and artistry, heavy on bitter twists and turns.
Losorata – songwriter, performer, music journalist, reflective – has gone through it all. He felt compelled to genuinely tell his story and share pop culture through his eyes, especially that his life mirrors that of a dreamer facing difficulties and surviving the whole shebang with dignity intact and without regrets.
The Gumption of Mr. Toilet
As technology rapidly replaces rote learning in education, Gumption becomes a critical skill in everyone’s survival in the future.
This book demonstrates how you can use Gumption to leverage other people’s assets and resources, and mobilise them into achieving common goals at exponential scale.
This story tell of how Jack Sim who was born poor and failed academically, became a successful serial entrepreneur and an ultra-successful serial social entrepreneur, changing the world by mobilising global movements. He also eventually became a professor with an Honorary Doctorate Degree.
This is a life-changing inspirational book that you will benefit abundantly while reading it.
God’s Ashes : Apocrypha
A gripping tale of loss, betrayal, and redemption set across the porous maritime borders of Southeast Asia and the remote islands of the Pacific.
In God’s Ashes, an archipelago of displaced characters – refugees, dissidents, and indigents – converge in an unseen transnational crime. Years later, their hard-won reshaped identities threaten to crumble when one among them disappears. The ensuing search could upend the existing world order.
A Stitch in Time
Clare is alone in her school’s tunnel walkway when a famous teenage stage actor strides into sight – and promptly disappears! Caught in an avalanche of supernatural incidents, she soon discovers that the actor, Gavin Lai, has become invisible – and she is the only one who is able to see him.
Despite her reluctance and distaste for the handsome but self-absorbed actor, Clare teams up with him to get to the bottom of this strange predicament.
In Gavin’s absence, his rival has taken over his breakout role on stage. Does he have anything to do with Gavin’s disappearance? Or is there something supernatural about this former missionary school, with its hauntingly old colonial structures and its sinisterly omniscient clock tower?
The investigation now takes centre stage as Clare slowly breaks out of her shell, while Gavin’s past catches up with him. Has he been cursed into this nightmare because of what he has done?
In the midst of discovering the truth, they also discover themselves and each other. But is that enough to mend the rift in space and time?
For the People’s Glory
In the totalitarian state of Utopia, the top scientist developing the super chip that will propel the country to technological supremacy in the world is detained by the state security bureau. His best friend and the head of the state’s semiconductor joint venture Shan Hongbing needs to know why. As he digs in, he realizes that the eyes are also on him for asking questions. The state’s surveillance technology he reveres—which ‘keeps the citizens safe’—has now turned against him, tracking his every move at every turn to hold him in line with the Utopia’s principles. Hongbing’s attempt to get to the bottom of the mystery slowly unravels a web of politicking, espionage and betrayal, whatever it takes for the ruling party to achieve its cause. The moment he decides to flee from the system is also the time he finds himself no longer safe.
Shattered Hopes
Drawing on interviews with first-hand sources in and outside the administration, official minutes and still classified documents, Shattered Hopes focuses on PH1.0’s rocky 22-months in power to tell the story of how a fledgling Government filled with so much promise and hope, was racked by internal power struggles and politicking even in its very first weeks in power, amid policy paralysis, racial politicking and the ultimate unwillingness of veteran Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad to hand over power to his twice-anointed successor, Anwar Ibrahim.
In doing so, Shattered Hopes presents readers with a vivid blow by blow account of how broken promises, political patronage and trade-offs, economic dysfunction and racial polarization eventually became the defining characteristics of the promised New Malaysia.
Tethered
Tracy was at the start of her law career and at the cusp of life when she got a debilitating brainstem stroke that affected her breathing, swallowing, speech, eyesight, and severely weakened her left and paralyzed her right. She found herself effectively a thinking statue at the age of thirty-five.
This is an account of her journey to recovery. As her brain is reset, she finds, so is her life. Like a growing child, she learns the most basic things anew, and more insightfully, the second time around. She sees the world in a different dimension this time?as wheelchair-bound. She discovers what faith means when it is all that is left.
In amusing and heart-wrenching anecdotes, Tracy finds that there is a life to be had, even in the cracks.
Hue City
Meet the notorious Ativan Gang, a group of scammers in Manila who befriends solo tourists, then drugs and robs them. Twenty-five-year-old Carmen Maranan is their newest member, a college dropout desperate to see her mother, Nicole, now living with her new family in Vietnam’s old capital, Hue City. When Carmen flees Manila for Hue, she meets Hai, a receptionist, tout, and part-time pimp. Ambitious and driven, Hai’s goal is to be rich and run his own hotel, a dream that feels closer when he crosses paths with Marina, a wealthy Singaporean yearning for a new life—and love.
Told from the points of view of Carmen, Hai and Marina, Hue City brings you deep into the soul of Southeast Asia—from the faded, enigmatic streets of Vietnam’s former capital, to the fraught, gritty drags of Manila and the gleaming, cosmopolitan environs of Singapore—as it tells their intertwined journey towards the treacherous and sometimes heart-breaking path of starting over.
Ascension
First, you need to give it something precious to you. Then, a shelter, a doorway…
Something lives in a rotting house in the town of Santa Clara.
Emilia has not thought of this house for years, until a chance meeting with Alma, an old friend from her hometown.
When Alma suddenly dies, Emilia finds her way back to Santa Clara, to her circle of friends who rekindle memories of a bizarre ritual left unfinished.
Of a dark visitor who sits by their bed at night, of a being who won’t let them sleep.
Must they once again awaken whoever dwells in that lonely house?”