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by F.H. Batacan
From the master of Filipino crime fiction, a genre-bending collection that documents murders, disappearances, and acts of violence in stories that range from procedural crime to horror to near-future noir.
F.H. Batacan's first novel, Smaller and Smaller Circles, was an instant classic when it was published in 1999, a masterpiece of Filipino crime fiction that won the Philippine National Book Award. In this extraordinary and far-ranging story collection, she explores the darkest corners of human experience, depicting with pitch-black humor the systems of class and politics that her characters are trapped in and the moments of violence—accidental or otherwise—that can, at any moment, shatter their lives. In particular, Batacan shines an unsparing light on the epidemic of violence against women in the Philippines.
When a wealthy politician's twelve-year-old son disappears, the family's driver witnesses the aftermath. A field investigator for the World Health Organization travels the globe giving presentations about a biomedical enzyme that will lead to the extinction of the human race. And Father Augusto Saenz, the Jesuit priest and forensic anthropologist from Smaller and Smaller Circles, returns to investigate the murder of a woman whose secretive life holds the key to her death.
Sure to confirm Batacan's status as a crime writer of global status, Accidents Happen is a relentless exploration of worlds where the smallest moments are infused with life and vibrating with menace, and death is always close at hand.
"Themes of death, violence, and injustice are woven through these 11 subtle yet thrilling tales from Batacan ... Impressively, these tales feel both firmly tethered to their Philippines setting and universal in their portrayal of how violence haunts people's lives. This excellent and elliptical collection will stay with readers long after they turn the final page." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"All manner of crimes determine the superbly satisfying stories in Filipino journalist F.H. Batacan's magnificent story collection." —Shelf Awareness
This information about Accidents Happen and Other Stories was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
F.H. Batacan is a Filipino journalist, musician, and crime fiction writer currently based in Singapore. After ten years of working in the Philippine intelligence community, she turned to broadcast journalism. Smaller and Smaller Circles, her first novel, won the Philippine National Book Award.
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