De La Salle University Publishing House (DLSUPH)
The Golden Dagger
by Soledad S. Reyes
Published and distributed by
De La Salle University (DLSU) Publishing House, 2016
ISBN 978-971-555-637-8
THE GOLDEN DAGGER revolves around Dalisay, a beautiful woman from the barrio, and the interconnected series of tragedies that befall her. The novel depicts her slow but almost inexorable descent into madness as she loses her sweetheart, her only means of livelihood, her mother, and her son due to the machinations of Don Sergio, the powerful father of her faithless sweetheart. She seeks to exact revenge but is eventually defeated by the conspiracy of forces around her. This novel is a gritty delineation of love determined by insidious sociopolitical forces reflective of the tensions in Philippine society in the 1930s.
SOLEDAD S. REYES , Professor Emeritus at the Ateneo de Manila University, has published extensively on various genres—the novel, the short story, criticism, and the komiks. For the past few years, she has been translating Tagalog novels/short stories into English as a way for the texts to reach a wider audience. Her translation, What Now Ricky?, received the A. L. Becker Southeast Asian Literature in Translation Prize for 2016 from the Southeast Asian Council (SEAC) of the Association for Asian Studies.