A beautifully written memoir making a distinctive contribution to Australian literature concerning the immigrant experience. Purita Echevarria de Gonzalez was born in Manila in the 1920s and describes an enchanted world, forever lost, with great poignancy and compelling immediacy. The reader suffers with her as this world is savagely destroyed by the outbreak of war, the Japanese occupation and the annihilation of the city by American saturation bombardment. The author is equally adept at describing without sentimentality, the halcyon pre-war time of her childhood and teens, and without sensationalism, the horrors of starvation and disease, brutality and massacre.
Manila: A Memoir of Love and Loss makes the past come alive, with its skilful blending of the personal, including a love story which runs through the narrative, and the historical (we briefly glimpse Marcos as a youthful partisan). Finely written, and inspiring in its portrayal of courage and compassion in the face of suffering, this memoir has a haunting quality which makes it impossible to put down.
