FILIPINA

Mindanao, 1942

Nanay Maestra is a schoolteacher, not a soldier.

Then Japanese troops enter her mountain village searching for gold that does not exist. By sunset, Pigsag-an is burning, her family is dead, and frightened children are looking to their teacher for the one answer she does not have:

What do we do now?

Nanay begins with the only thing she knows—keep the children alive.

But survival becomes resistance. A hidden camp becomes an intelligence network. Villagers become couriers, guides, medics, and fighters. An American priest, a downed pilot, guerrilla commander Wendell Fertig, Moro leader Mohammad Ali Dimaporo, and scattered Filipino soldiers become part of a growing struggle against occupation.

And through it all, Nanay must decide not only how to fight the Japanese—but what kind of people they will become while fighting them.

From prisoner rescues and jungle ambushes to sabotage, hunger, betrayal, bombing, and liberation, one schoolteacher discovers that leadership is not knowing every answer.

It is knowing which lives must come first.

FILIPINA is a sweeping historical novel of courage, resistance, sacrifice, and the women and men of the Philippines who refused to surrender their humanity when war demanded everything from them.