“ … dazzles like a kaleidoscope.” -THE AGE

“HUSH, I KNOW a story you don't know.”

“There is no room for another time. The hut is too small even for the present. Life must be squeezed to pocket size, breath must be kept spare, so there’s enough left for the next day, so the walls hold up. Be frugal where life is fragile. Tears are an imposition here.”

It’s Christmas and ten-year-old Noland, a mute lantern maker, imagines an angel falling from the sky to the slums where he lives. But it’s only an American tourist caught in a drive-by shooting of a political journalist. At a busy intersection in Manila, the magical and the seedy collide: shimmering lanterns and poverty, carols and prostitution, dreams of friendship and the global war on terror.

“Perhaps only a poet could transform the themes of her second novel into something as gorgeous, disturbing, loving, and oddly hopeful as The Solemn Lantern Maker.” -THE BOSTON GLOBE