Author(s): Monica Macansantos

General fiction

A man navigates a new relationship while failing to fall out of love with an old one, and another man, imprisoned by taboo, learns the price of love. A child visits the grave of a cousin she's never met, and another child strives for parental affection that, little does she know, can never be realised. A fractured friendship ruptures beyond repair and a family collides on how to care for a father whose cognition is declining.

'There had been a time when he felt safe with her, when he believed that her love alone would carry him away from Auckland, away from his parents and their unchanging expectations. He rose from bed and peered outside her window, at a city that had grown familiar to him without shaking off its foreignness.'

Lost in and out of their homeland, Monica Macansantos's characters contemplate love whilst navigating the naivety of childhood, the complications of young adulthood and the politics of marriage.

Macansantos is a powerful and emotive new voice of the Filipino diaspora, bringing us the vivid, raw and quintessentially human collection that is Love and Other Rituals: Selected Stories. With her mellifluous and uncanny style, she paints death with vitality, absence with fulfilment and tension with ease. The mountain city of Baguio runs through this collection like a vein, tying children and adults alike to a common origin.

These are stories of yearning, loneliness and resilience within the complexity of human connection. Macansantos reveals that love is in the little moments: a proffered dish, a lingering touch, a reverential silence.