The Last Time I Saw Mother

Caridad is a wife and mother, a native of the Philippines living in Sydney, when her elderly mother summons her home to Manila without explanation. There she learns a truth that unmakes her sense of herself: the woman who raised her, Thelma, is in fact her aunt — and her vivacious aunt Emma is her birth mother.

Told through the multiple, shifting first-person voices of these three women and Caridad's beautiful, bitter cousin Ligaya, the novel unspools the long story behind a secret adoption — the joys and sorrows her parents kept to themselves, and the never-forgotten tragedy of the war years, when the brutal Japanese occupation devastated a country and its people. Arlene J. Chai's debut is a rich family saga about mothers and daughters, a cultural identity born of Spanish, Chinese, and Filipino influence, and the healing that truth can bring.