“Brilliant . . . Miguel Syjuco is his country’s most original and unflinching literary voice.” —Salman Rushdie
"It’s a rare novel that leaves you reeling simultaneously with admiration, exhaustion, amazement at its author’s reach and skill, and desolation at the world it spreads out before you . . . [A] raging protest of a book.” —James Lasdun, The New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)
From Miguel Syjuco, the winner of the Man Asian Literary Prize for Ilustrado, I Was the President's Mistress!! is an unflinching satire about power, corruption, sex, and all the other topics you were told never to discuss in polite company.
First came the Sexy-Sexygate scandal. Then an impeachment trial. Finally, a battle royale for the presidency. At the center of this political typhoon is Vita Nova, the most famous movie star in the Philippines and a former paramour of the country’s most powerful man. Now, for the first time ever, she bares herself completely in a tell-all memoir that puts the sensational in sensationalistic.
The setting: a sweating, heaving country. The time: right now. The plot: a drug war rages, an assassin brandishes a pistol, a damsel rises from ashes to power, and a government teeters on the brink. Among the players: a dreamer who boxed and acted his way to the presidency, his Koran-toting nemesis in the senate, a horny bishop, a cowboy turned warlord, a poor little rich boy dying with his dynasty, a washed-up reporter redeemed by one last scoop, a high-school sweetheart driven mad by decades of disappointment, and an American naval officer tempting our heroine with a way out. As Vita warns, viewer discretion is advised.
In this masterful and audacious novel, Miguel Syjuco’s signature style—hilarious, insightful, playful, provocative—animates thirteen indelible voices whose stories present a cross-section of a complicated society. I Was the President’s Mistress!! hurtles headlong into love, politics, faith, history, memory, and the ongoing war over who will tell the stories the world shall know as truth.
Genre: Literary Fiction
"It’s a rare novel that leaves you reeling simultaneously with admiration, exhaustion, amazement at its author’s reach and skill, and desolation at the world it spreads out before you . . . [A] raging protest of a book.” —James Lasdun, The New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)
From Miguel Syjuco, the winner of the Man Asian Literary Prize for Ilustrado, I Was the President's Mistress!! is an unflinching satire about power, corruption, sex, and all the other topics you were told never to discuss in polite company.
First came the Sexy-Sexygate scandal. Then an impeachment trial. Finally, a battle royale for the presidency. At the center of this political typhoon is Vita Nova, the most famous movie star in the Philippines and a former paramour of the country’s most powerful man. Now, for the first time ever, she bares herself completely in a tell-all memoir that puts the sensational in sensationalistic.
The setting: a sweating, heaving country. The time: right now. The plot: a drug war rages, an assassin brandishes a pistol, a damsel rises from ashes to power, and a government teeters on the brink. Among the players: a dreamer who boxed and acted his way to the presidency, his Koran-toting nemesis in the senate, a horny bishop, a cowboy turned warlord, a poor little rich boy dying with his dynasty, a washed-up reporter redeemed by one last scoop, a high-school sweetheart driven mad by decades of disappointment, and an American naval officer tempting our heroine with a way out. As Vita warns, viewer discretion is advised.
In this masterful and audacious novel, Miguel Syjuco’s signature style—hilarious, insightful, playful, provocative—animates thirteen indelible voices whose stories present a cross-section of a complicated society. I Was the President’s Mistress!! hurtles headlong into love, politics, faith, history, memory, and the ongoing war over who will tell the stories the world shall know as truth.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Praise for this book
"I Was the President's Mistress!! is a tour de force. Virtuosic, kinetically funny Miguel Syjuco can riff on just about anything--from celebrity gossip to Internet troll farms, pop music to the Philippine electoral circus--as he explores our era's thorniest questions of class, gender, power, and violence. At the heart of this blistering satire is Vita Nova, a heroine for the ages, whose rise to fame and epic romantic odyssey stop the breath and stoke the conscience like nothing else I've ever read." - Mia Alvar
"Nobody writes like Miguel Syjuco. A triumph." - Elif Batuman
"It's a rare novel that leaves you reeling simultaneously with admiration, exhaustion, amazement at its author's reach and skill, and desolation at the world it spreads out before you . . . Syjuco writes in English peppered with Filipinisms, and has fashioned a flexible, pun-riddled argot that adapts itself beautifully to a range of types . . . The best of [the novel's monologues] strike me as miniature masterpieces of the form, combining technical virtuosity with a psychological penetration that exposes the precise emotional dynamic driving each of these warped and riven figures, and then traces its evolution into their political outlook . . . That [Vita] is almost certainly the best hope for her country is a chilling notion, all the more so for the resemblance of that tottering republic to our own." - James Lasdun
"An urgent book, and a necessary one: a Tyrants Destroyed for the twenty-first century." - Tom McCarthy
"A super-typhoon of a novel. A Babel of rogues, survivors and shape-shifters. A polemic against corruption and greed. A sassy, swerving mini-series, touched by grace and beauty. A Filipino Bonfire of the Vanities for our beleaguered times. An uncompromising work of art." - David Mitchell
"Brilliant . . . Miguel Syjuco is his country's most original and unflinching literary voice." - Salman Rushdie
"A tour de force--bawdy, fearless, insightful, delightful." - Kamila Shamsie
"Nobody writes like Miguel Syjuco. A triumph." - Elif Batuman
"It's a rare novel that leaves you reeling simultaneously with admiration, exhaustion, amazement at its author's reach and skill, and desolation at the world it spreads out before you . . . Syjuco writes in English peppered with Filipinisms, and has fashioned a flexible, pun-riddled argot that adapts itself beautifully to a range of types . . . The best of [the novel's monologues] strike me as miniature masterpieces of the form, combining technical virtuosity with a psychological penetration that exposes the precise emotional dynamic driving each of these warped and riven figures, and then traces its evolution into their political outlook . . . That [Vita] is almost certainly the best hope for her country is a chilling notion, all the more so for the resemblance of that tottering republic to our own." - James Lasdun
"An urgent book, and a necessary one: a Tyrants Destroyed for the twenty-first century." - Tom McCarthy
"A super-typhoon of a novel. A Babel of rogues, survivors and shape-shifters. A polemic against corruption and greed. A sassy, swerving mini-series, touched by grace and beauty. A Filipino Bonfire of the Vanities for our beleaguered times. An uncompromising work of art." - David Mitchell
"Brilliant . . . Miguel Syjuco is his country's most original and unflinching literary voice." - Salman Rushdie
"A tour de force--bawdy, fearless, insightful, delightful." - Kamila Shamsie
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