First published 2021
Stephanie Sy-Quia's debut excavates a family's fractured transnational narrative through meticulous personal archaeology. Her father—a Filipino diplomat's son—emerges as a ghostly figure whose movements span Manila, London, and Paris. Sy-Quia assembles fragments: archival documents, overheard conversations, inherited photographs, and family mythologies. Each piece becomes a potential key to understanding her own complex heritage and the silences that have shaped her identity. As she reconstructs her paternal lineage, Sy-Quia confronts the legacies of colonialism, migration, and cultural displacement. Her investigation is both intimate and geopolitical, tracking how individual lives are inscribed by larger historical currents. Memory becomes a contested terrain—unreliable, shifting, persistently incomplete. This is a search for belonging that refuses simple resolution: a lyrical mapping of inheritance, absence, and the stories families choose to tell—and those they bury.
Genres: literary-fiction, historical-fiction, autobiography, memoir, biography-memoir, 21st-century, family-drama, cultural-studies
Vibes: atmospheric, intimate, lyrical, thought-provoking
Tropes: contested-terrain, fractured-narrative, unreliable-narrator
Setting: London, Manila, Paris
Period: 21st-century
112 pages · Paperback · Granta Books
Content warnings: colonialism