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Linda Ty-Casper

The Three-Cornered Sun

The Three-Cornered Sun

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Format: Paperback
Paperback ISBN: 978-621-96757-1-0
Dimensions: 496 pages, 130mm x 180mm x 39mm, 456g

Preface by Linda Ty-Casper
Foreword by Manuel L. Quezon III

Linda Ty-Casper’s The Three-Cornered Sun tells the story of the Philippines on the brink of revolution against Spain in 1896. Filtered through the recollections of the author’s grandmother Gabriela Paez Viardo de Velasquez, The Three-Cornered Sun follows the lives of the members of the Viardo family as they go through the turbulent times of that tumultuous year—sometimes on opposing sides. First published in 1979, the historical novel is interspersed with appearances of notable figures of the period, such as Andrés Bonifacio and Emilio Aguinaldo.

In a new foreword written for this edition, historian Manuel L. Quezon III notes that The Three-Cornered Sun “is more accurately a story that explores how the revolution was itself a confrontation between Filipinos.”

View the character guide here.

(If you would like to purchase a copy of The Three-Cornered Sun from outside the Philippines, please e-mail orders@explodinggalaxies.com)

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  •  The 1896 Philippine Revolution is a story Filipinos know all too well, in one dimension, from boring textbook history. Linda Ty-Casper spins a tale from 1896 from a family living through the birthing pains of the nation. I regret judging Ty-Casper’s The Three-Cornered Sun from its cover when it was first published in 1979. Given a new lease on life, the novel speaks to a new generation that will hopefully ensure that the present (and the future) will stop reading like the past. —Ambeth Ocampo

     

  • "In my opinion, Linda Ty-Casper ranks among the greatest of Filipino novelists. She has been writing novels and short stories since the 1960s to the present time. Linda Ty-Casper’s greatness lies beyond her numerous awards and impressive number of books; it lies in her mastery in storytelling and her choice of subject matter." — Cecilia Manguerra Brainard (When the Rainbow Goddess Wept, Magdalena, The Newspaper Widow)

     

  • “Linda Ty Casper is a major figure in Philippine Literature. The literary work (fiction, poetry, play, or the essay called “creative nonfiction”) is work of language and work of imagination; it creates/makes real a human experience. The sense for language is the basic creative sense. The literary work is wrought from rather than written in a given language. The writer forges her own path through a given language’s lexical wilderness and makes her own clearing there. The ground of language which she shapes is a people’s culture through their history. Herself shaped by language, she is already spoken for, but may, in her own time, speak back and clarify, even modify, a given outlook. Any language then (Tagalog, English), given an adequate mastery of it, can shape one’s sense of country (like nation, an abstraction).Thus, our literature, from whatever language, is our people’s memory.  A country is only as strong as her people’s memory, Imagination’s heartland. One’s country is what one’s Imagination owes its allegiance to.”
    — Gemino Abad, National Artist for Literature

He could hear the men moving about, reciting the Supremo's manifestos as though litanies to ward off the devil. The week before they had torn their cedulas without which they could not enter the city; and a kind of desperation turned all their thoughts collectively to the joint attack on Manila that morning, the last Sunday of August.

Linda Ty-Casper

Linda Ty-Casper, one of the foremost figures of Philippine historical fiction, was born in 1931 in Malabon, Philippines. Born Belinda Ty during the American occupation of the archipelago, the prolific writer spent her youth in wartime, enchanted by her grandmother’s stories of revolution and rebellion. She studied law at the University of the Philippines, Diliman, and at Harvard University in Cambridge. She married Leonard Casper, an American literary critic, in 1956. For her writing, Ty-Casper received grants and fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute, the Djerassi Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, as well as accolades such as the S.E.A. Write Award. Including more than sixteen books, Ty-Casper’s oeuvre is praised for being meticulous in detail and research, all the while grappling with Philippine history.