Fitzcarraldo bags Apostol's ‘innovative’ novel

Fitzcarraldo Editions has snapped up Filipino novelist Gina Apostol's “startlingly innovative” novel, Insurrecto.

Fitzcarraldo Editions’ publisher Jacques Testard acquired UK and Commonwealth rights (excluding Canada, Australia and New Zealand) from Hannah Whitaker at Rights People on behalf of the New York-based independent publisher Soho Press, with publication slated for 17th July 2019. 

In Insurrecto, two women write duelling scripts about the Philippine-American War while on a road trip to the town of Balangiga, the site of a violent conflict between occupying American forces and Filipinos in 1901. 

“Within the spiralling voices and narrative layers of Insurrecto are stories of women – artists, lovers, revolutionaries, daughters – finding their way to their own truths and histories,” said the publisher. “Using interlocking voices and a kaleidoscopic structure, Insurrecto is a startlingly innovative, meditative, and playful novel about memory, history, war, and culture.”

Testard said: “I am very excited to have acquired Gina Apostol's Insurrecto for Fitzcarraldo Editions. Imagine a cross between Julio Cort ázar's Hopscotch, Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing, and Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke – but funnier – and you have a vague approximation of what this novel is like. I have never read anything like it."