Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award
In the news: “Penguin Group (USA) announced today that it will now have the privilege of selecting the Top 10 finalists from among the Top 100 semifinalists for the first Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award (ABNA), the international writing competition in search of the next popular novel.” The article comments on how “[g]rass-roots support is thriving offline as well, with the home team effect in evidence. The Indianapolis Star ran a piece about a local music teacher’s semifinalist status; the Manila (Phillippines) Times proudly plugged the entry of a Filipino-American emigrant living in California; and a teacher blogged about his pride over a former student’s ascension to the ranks of semifinalist, just to name a few.”
The Filipino-American novelist is Enrico Antiporda. Amazon describes his novel, A Light in the Crane, as “a coming-of-age story chronicling a Filipino boy’s wrenching passage from son of privilege to guerilla fighter [that] is a stylistic tour-de-force. From its first lines, the saga of Jando Flores seizes readers with the same chilling intensity as the cold water that wraps around Jando’s chest as he hides in a river to escape a gang of pillaging cutthroats. While such murderous militias dispossess cane farmers in the Central Plains of the Philippines, the NPA (a brutal leftist insurgency) combats the government troops of Ferdinand Marcos and the ruthless sugar barons who steal the poor farmers’ land. Jando, whose family owns a plantation, is forced into the NPA, but he remains a sensitive soul, brimming with empathy for his fellow countrymen-even as he watches others, like his beloved uncle, morph into fierce, sadistic killers. Incandescent descriptions radiate from the pages of this book. When a wounded Jando wakes, after narrowly escaping a death squad, he sees “marmalade light? slicing through the fronds, weaving orange and black tiger stripes.” Mountain bandits, sugar warlords, Peace Corps volunteers, dignitaries, and revolutionaries all jostle beneath “mango-colored” skies in this riveting epic of loss and transformation, but it is a masterful and delicate choreography.” The novel’s first sixteen pages can be downloaded here.
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