America Is Not the Heart

As for loving America or not loving America, these aren’t your problems, either. Your word for love is survival. Everything else is a story that isn’t about you. How many lives can one person lead in a single lifetime? When Hero De Vera arrives in America, disowned by her parents in the Philippines, she's already on her third. Her uncle, Pol, who has offered her a fresh start and a place to stay in the Bay Area, knows not to ask about the first and second. And his younger wife, Paz, has learned enough about the might and secrecy of the De Vera family to keep her head down. Only their daughter Roni asks Hero why her hands seem to scream with hurt at the steering wheel of the car she drives to collect her from school, and only Rosalyn, the fierce but open-hearted beautician, has any hope of bringing Hero back from the dead. Praised by the Guardian as 'a blazingly fearless debut novel', America is not the Heart is a soulful literary saga set in the early nineties of San Francisco. It is, at once, a coming-of-age story, a story about the redemptive, restorative power of love, about trust and fear, hair and makeup, food and sex. A novel about belonging and not belonging at the same time. Confronting up-to-the-minute debates about immigration and national identity, it's a book that leaves a striking impression.