Our Books
The Milflores catalog is a list of titles that endeavor to spark conversations, promote learning and fuel the imagination. With each title, it is hoped that readers find a book to love and cherish for a very long time.
Oha: A Story Told in One Eternal Second
Krie R.Lopez
Mia, a fifteen-year-old spirit, yearns for a normal teenage life. With childlike wonder, she finds herself immersed in the lives of the families around her old neighborhood, and unexpectedly delighted with the spirits she eventually meets.
In over 50 years (or an eternal second) of Mia’s afterlife, her questions become inevitable: “What counts as living?” “Does one really disappear after death?” “Are there universal Truths?” While she searches for answers, Mia is caught in the intoxicating nuances of young romance, the nurturing bliss from real friendships, and the complex history of Baguio City from the 1940s to the earthquake in 1990 and beyond.
A novel on making up for lost time, forging unexpected connections, and exploring the forces that connect nature, life, and death, Oha brings us the intricacies of faith and spirituality, and the ebbs and flows that unite us all: grief, guilt, joy, love.
ISBN: 9789718281376
Paperback, 256 pages
Trim Size: 5.5" x 7.5"
Weight: 0.23 kg
Rizal in Saga: A Life for Student Fans
Nick Joaquin
In 1996, on the occasion of the centenary of Jose Rizal's death, the esteemed Filipino writer Nick Joaquin wrote the biography of the country's premier hero Jose Rizal. Relying foremost on Rizal's own journals and his works, Joaquin's Rizal in Saga brings forth Rizal's humanity--his fears, his insecurities, his influences, and the fortitude that ultimately leads him to become, as Joaquin calls him, "the grandest of Filipinos."
In language distinctly Joaquin, Rizal's life and works are contextualized, coaxing the reader to understand Rizal, the man in conflict in the context of a country in turmoil. "Rizal's career illustrates the theory of challenge and response as the secret of progress. He started out timid and insecure; he ended up bold and confident. Rizal soared because his every response overshot the challenge. With each achievement, whether in science or letters or scholarship, he added one more cubit to his stature, until he could no longer decry himself as little."
This new edition of Joaquin's Rizal in Saga: A Life for Student Fans, introduced and annotated by Ambeth R. Ocampo, the country's foremost public historian and authority on Jose Rizal, contains new photographs from various sources as well as Ocampo's collection to bring Rizal the person and the saga that was his life, even closer to new student fans.
ISBN 9789718281123
Hardcover, 308 pages
Trim Size: 6" x 9"
HARVEST MOON: Poems and Stories from the Edge of the Climate Crisis
“You could make an atlas of trouble out of this book, out of floods and droughts and fires and famines, out of the instability of what we counted on for our stability and our sustenance in body and spirit and hope. One of the questions that arises for me is what will sustain us through this period. We will need stories more than ever…"
From the Afterword by Rebecca Solnit
Harvest Moon is an anthology of loves and lives, of stories that thrive where borders and edges meet and where fates merge and collide like bodies of water seeking oceans and tides encountering clouds and landfall, habitats and hives. This anthology of 30 images and over 30 poems, stories, and essays about the climate crisis brings together writers, photographers, and artists from Africa, Asia, the Pacific, and Latin America. The pages of this book span generations, countries, habitats, languages, and multiple realities.
ISBN 9789718281147
Paperback, 336 pages
Trim size: 8" x 10"
Ongpin Stories
R. Kwan Laurel
"Ongpin lives in these stories."
-NVM Gonzalez, National Artist for Literature
Digging our chopsticks into these stories, we examine a teenage boy raised in a strict Chinese household struggling to pass his Mandarin lessons; a radical teacher whose pure motives yield to miscalculated actions; a policeman and his insane friend's search for gold; a mathematical genius who dreams of leaving for Hong Kong; a Filipino sales clerk and his forbidden fondness for the eldest daughter of a Chinese businessman; a grandmother fighting an illness neither traditional medicine nor modern science can cure; a father's struggle to preserve his family's small business.
Brilliantly observed, these stories of people finding their place in a new world while struggling to hold back the seeping influences of their adopted country linger long after we've savored the feast that is Ongpin.
ISBN 9789718281093
Paperback, 104 pages
Trim size: 5" x 8"
Why Keanu Reeves is Lonely and Why the World Goes On as It Does
Simeon Dumdum, Jr.
This collection of poems by Simeon Dumdum Jr. displays the breadth of his poetic sensibility. It has the spread of a wide blanket which takes into its folds both secular and religious topics and their public and private ramifications. With equal ease, and unobtrusively, he employs such forms as the sonnet, ghazal, haiku, sapphic, rhyme royal, sijo, and, of course, free verse, to give his topics the suitable organic architecture that they require. With Dumdum’s poetry everything is par for the course—science, politics, the environment, history, jazz, liturgy, suicide bombings, massacres, wars, and the lockdown caused by the pandemic. With these flow the undercurrents of grief, anger, worship, wonder and loneliness, and the poet’s love for his wife and family. All in all, a catholic--in the sense of all-embracing--collection.
Hardcover
ISBN 9789718281055
Trim size: 4.5" x 6"
Pages: 108
ISBN: 9789718281055
White Lady, Black Christ
Charlson Ong
A thriller involving a religious, cross-cultural conspiracy certain to shake the foundations of faith.
An explosion leads Dr. Chester Limhuatco’s to the discovery of Emily, the “white lady” he has been having visions of. To know her identity, he enlists the help of Jefferson Po, a government agent who works closely with Emily. Together, Chester and Jefferson pursue the mystery surrounding Emily and her involvement with Tata Peping, a modern day “Itim na Nazareno” or Black Christ.
Tata Peping heads the cult-like Brotherhood of the Blessed Black Nazarene, a group with a grand plan to violently awaken people from lies they have been told all their lives. Jefferson and Chester must prevent Tata Peping from achieving his nefarious goal.
Set in the midst of Quiapo, the heart of the frenzied devotion and veneration of the statue of the Black Nazarene, White Lady, Black Christ is a high-stakes pursuit of the truth behind a strange brotherhood and the rituals surrounding blind devotion and the search for salvation as told by a masterful storyteller.
Hardcover and paperback
ISBN (HB) 9789718280980
ISBN (PB) 9789718280966
5" x 8", 288 pages
At Home With Crazy
Katrina Martin
A powerful story about family, friendship, and... zombies!
Cayt is obsessed with zombies, whether they're in the great filmaker Harriette Swarog's movies or in the short film she's making for school. But there's one zombie she'd like to get away from--her mother.
When they move to Manila, Cayt tries to be normal by keeping mum about Mom. Soon she has bigger problems than her new friends finding out about her mom's... eccentricities. Mom's mood swings are worsening and driving Cayt, her Dad, and little sister up the wall. Will Cayt ever get to have a normal life, or is she bound to transform into a zombie herself?
Paperback
ISBN 9789718281222
5.5" x 7.5", 288 pages
Internationally acclaimed activist Liv Strömquist is on point with this collection of humorous comics essays about how historical and societal shifts have altered ― and perhaps destroyed ― "romantic love."
Activist Liv Strömquist’s The Reddest Rose responds to the question: Why does Leonardo DiCaprio date an endless string of 20-something models? Her answer ― in the form of this collection of well-researched, humorous comics essays ― tracks how philosophers and artists, from the Ancient Greeks to Beyoncé, conceptualized romantic love. Strömquist’s signature characters, drawn in a flat, blocky style, ask each other questions and offer sharp commentary as they guide readers throughout history and the change in societies' values, from showing love/loving to getting love/being loved.
"An amazing treatise on love--what is it, why do we look for it, how do we deal with it--framed by the love life of Leonardo di Caprio but which takes us back to Greece and forward to bryon and Beyonce. Read, chuckle, and learn. Highly recommended."--Ninotchka Rosca, author of State of War
"Waiiiiit, this isn't your kilig kinda komiks book. It is a well-written kinda research, with spectacular spread of dancing dolphons in the horizon."--Bebang Siy, manunulat ng It's a MensWorld