Hot new fiction from Penguin SEA

SINCE fiction is a hot topic these days, please allow me to introduce the new Philippine books of fiction forthcoming or recently published by Penguin Random House, the world's biggest trade publisher. Its Southeast Asian office has headquarters in Singapore, from where it publishes the most exciting writing now being done in the region.

Hotshot journalist and novelist Marga Ortigas returns with «God's Ashes: Apocrypha,» following her successful novel, «The House on Calle Sombra.» Her second novel is billed as a gripping tale of loss, betrayal and redemption set across the porous maritime borders of Southeast Asia and the remote islands of the Pacific.

In God's Ashes, an archipelago of displaced characters — assassins, refugees, dissidents and indigents — converge in a place where a transnational crime happens. Years later, their hard-won and reshaped identities threaten to crumble when one of them simply vanishes. The ensuing search could possibly upend the existing world order.

The Philippine juggernaut at Penguin continues with Mouths to Speak, Voices to Sing, stories by Kenneth Yu. This imaginative book includes singing Chinese antiquities, ghosts that only a young man could sense and a house with a sentient AI that becomes a part of the family.

But there's more! There is also a cricket that acts as a tragic voice of reason and a man born and bred for neural mass surveillance. This anthology is a collection of unpredictable stories of various genres — fantasy, science fiction, crime, horror and the supernatural. I like books like these since you can dip your toes into various kinds of stories filled with wonder and surprise.

Yu's stories touch on courage and fear, loss and resolution, denial and honesty, hope and despair. Every story is written in a versatile language, with characters you can empathize with. Altogether, this is a book of enchanting and entertaining stories.

The Gothic vein continues with Ascension, a novel by Eliza Victoria. It deals with a routing house in the town of Santa Clara, which by itself seems like a character in the novel.

The main character, Enilia, has not thought of this house for years until a chance meeting with