Joy by Angelo R. Lacuesta (signed)

Ariston Letrero is a renaissance man: audio producer, insurance salesman, musician, composer, part-time fast food mascot, and a philanderer who quickly and quietly abandons his wife and son, Lucas, at the peak of his mottled career, for a new life in America with his lover Odette.

Years and years later, he sends an email to his son, Lucas Letrero, an advertising man who has been brought up on super robot cartoons, Catholic school truisms, and a diet of fast food and loneliness, and who has reconnected with his childhood sweetheart Dedes, who has made a post-annulment life for herself in America.

In the 30-odd years in between is a story that sings songs and anthems of identity, relations, loneliness, and loss, and how they figure in the lives of contemporary Filipinos who are not scattered across space and time, but who are also connected and separated at the same time.

Joy is a story of joy-lived forward, backward, sideways, and upside down, in lives and loves that are fragmented, separated, gathered, made virtual, and made real.

REVIEWS

"Angelo R. Lacuesta has the rare gift of all true literary artists. He creates characters and narratives that illuminate the universal quest for an answer to the great and enduring question of our existence: Who am I? Joy is a brilliant exploration of this great theme. Lacuesta weaves the four principle lives in the book seamlessly together as they ache for self. I have long been an ardent fan of Lacuesta’s short stories. Joy now reveals him as a master of the novel form, as well." —Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize laureate, author of  A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

"With a seductive prose that is at once utterly convincing and devastating in its palpable longing, Lacuesta delivers a subtle yet powerful story of love, absent fathers, killer robots, ad campaigns, and anthems.  In the process, he demonstrates through a time-and-continent- leaping storyline that the connections we make with others are always contingent, negotiable, and all the more beautiful for their impermanence." —Robin Hemley, author of The Art and Craft of Asian Stories: A Writer’s Guide 

"From these heap of remembrances—a teen-dream birthday at the InterContinental Manila, pomelo rinds on a coffee table in Davao, the English theme song of a Japanese super robot cartoon, blurry late-night Skype calls with an old friend in New York—Lucas emerges. Joy narrates life as a series of events whose sum, whether beautiful or miserable, frustrating or utterly joyful, is up to you." —Tatler Asia

"The story resonates with truth and throbs with nostalgia for those who were born in the 1960s, kids in the ‘70s, and teens in the ‘80s. This is the story of a Filipino Gen-Xer, much like Lacuesta and myself.... Lacuesta’s writing style is engaging and spry, it flows and draws you in, and will have you flipping pages until the wee hours. JOY is exactly that." —Jenny Ortuoste, manilastandard.net