About the Book:
Larry Esteva, coming home from studies in Boston witnesses at the airport a riotous demonstration that is forcibly dispersed by the military. The end of his journey turns out to be the beginning of an odyssey in his beloved city where he finds "an insidious lawlessness creeping upon the land."
Set in Manila in the last beleagured months before the declaration of martial law in 1972, the book tells of the last desperate efforts of a people fighting to stave off disaster.
Amid the escalating madness of a regime gone berserk, an odd assortment of people -- a senator, a young nationalist, a dispossed farmer, a radical activist, a convent school girl, a Jesuit scholastic -- make their way along the labyrinthine corridors of greed and power. Each must confront himself and examine his own commitment in the face of brutality and evil, as the book conjures up scene after scene of devastation: the massacre of the demonstrators, the demolition of Sapang Bato, the murder of the sugar plantation workers, the burning of the Laguardia ricefields. And as a climax to the mounting crescendo of violence, that final September day -- the arrests, the torture, and finally the darkness overtakes the land. - from Amzon