Books like O Susana! by Lillian Abella

José Rizal’s classic novel, *Noli Me Tangere*, depicts life in Spanish‑era Philippines, following young Ibarra as he confronts colonial injustice, societal decline, and the quest for education and freedom.

A memoir of American writer Susan Sontag, exploring her avant‑garde work and her magnetic, polarizing intellectual persona.

In Regency England, Lady Susan, a cunning widow, schemes to marry her sister‑in‑law’s brother while manipulating her daughter’s marriage, only to find the plans unravel in a turbulent social revolt.

Susan is a Native American girl who has lived a life of absolute poverty on the reservation. When her father is given the opportunity to take his family to the city, he sees it as a chance at a different sort of life. Susan sees it as a betrayal of her heritage and of everything that has been familiar up until now.

With Dusk (originally published in the Philippines as Po-on), F. Sionil Jose begins his five-novel Rosales Saga. 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 carefully begins to paint a portrait of his country, showing the terrible physical and emotional hardships the people endure as the Philippines is transformed by the "liberation" from Spanish rule and by the oppression that continues, even as the Americans take over. Still, far from drawing a picture of hopelessness, 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.

*Susan* portrays the cultural differences and social disharmony between American Indians and whites when the family of a young Indian girl moves from the reservation to Chicago. Originally published in 1966 as *Wigwam in the City*.