"The foremost Filipino novelist in English, his novels deserve a much wider readership than the Philippines can offer."

--Ian Buruma, New York Review of Books

"Tolstoy himself, not to mention Italo Svevo, would envy the author of this story."

--Chicago Tribune

Random House / Ballantine Books Web site
February, 2000

With Dusk (originally published in the Philippines as Po-on), F. Sionil Jose begins his five-novel Rosales Saga, which the poet and critic Ricaredo Demetillo called "the first great Filipino novels written in English." Set in the 1880s, Dusk records the exile of a tenant family from its village and the new life it attempts to make in the small town of Rosales. Here commences the epic tale of a family unwillingly thrown into the turmoil of history. But this is more than a historical novel; it is also the eternal story of man's tortured search for true faith and the larger meaning of existence. Jose has achieved a fiction of extraordinary scope and passion, a book as meaningful to Philippine literature as One Hundred Years of Solitude is to Latin American literature.