This is a very, very scarce edition of a work first published in the Philippines in 1965. It is one of Santos’s major works outside the Filipino-American exile fiction for which he is now better known. 

Santos’s first novel follows Fred, a poor young man drawn into the wealthy Medallada household at Villa Magdalena, where work, patronage and desire offer him entry into a world built on money and inherited power. His attachment to Nora becomes entangled with the family’s rivalries and moral decay, while the approach of the Second World War exposes how fragile their enclosed prosperity really is. The novel’s central movement is contamination of the lonely outsider entering the house hoping to belong, then begins absorbing the values that once excluded him. 

Dense, symbolic and often gothic in atmosphere, it uses the villa as both family estate and diseased social order, crowded with beauty, sex, death, odour and foreboding. Critics have read it as a novel of corruption and failed belonging: a study of the poor boy in the world of the rich, and of privilege already rotting from within.

Very scarce. New Day Publishers second edition, 1986, completely reset from the 1965 first edition. Paperback in very good condition with light rubbing, minor marks and slight corner wear.