Dusk

With Dusk (originally published in the Philippines as Po-on) F. Sionil Jose begins his five-novel Rosales Saga which the poet and critic Ricaredo Demetillo called the first great Filipino novels written in English. Set in the 1880s Dusk records the exile of a tenant family from its village and the new life it attempts to make in the small town of Rosales. Here commences the epic tale of a family unwillingly thrown into the turmoil of history. But this is more than a historical novel; it is also the eternal story of man''s tortured search for true faith and the larger meaning of existence. Jose has achieved a fiction of extraordinary scope and passion a book as meaningful to Philippine literature as One Hundred Years of Solitude is to Latin American literature.. The foremost Filipino novelist in English his novels deserve a much wider readership than the Philippines can offer.--Ian Buruma New York Review of Books. Tolstoy himself not to mention Italo Svevo would envy the author of this story.--Chicago Tribune