The Philippines

Dream Jungle, by Jessica Hagedorn (2003). Set in the jungles of the Philippines in the 1970s, and centered around the filming of a Vietnam war movie (meant as a parody of Apocalypse Now), Hagedorn's novel explores the collision between a country of rich natural beauty and the modern, globalizing world.

Dusk: A Novel, by F. Sionil José (1984). Buffalo-plowed fields, village life, and the punishing cycle of monsoon rains and drought form the backdrop to this story about a late 19th-century Filipino peasant who flees his hometown in northern Luzon for a new life in the central plains of Pangasinan. Written by one of the Philippines' most eminent authors, Dusk is the first of a five-novel historical saga spanning a century of the islands' tumultuous past.

Playing with Water: Passion and Solitude on a Philippine Island, by James Hamilton-Paterson (1987). A British writer gets into the rhythms of a Filipino fisherman's life in this lyrical memoir of years on a light-drenched Philippine islet in the 1980s.

When the Elephants Dance, by Tess Uriza Holthe (2002). Best-selling writer Holthe weaves native myths into the story of a group of people thrown together in WWII as they struggle to survive in the Japanese-occupied Philippines.